The Project Gutenberg eBook of Gaston de Latour; an unfinished romance, by Walter Pater

The white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs, with its precincts, composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominent object which towards the southwest broke the pleasant level of La Beauce, the great corn-land of central France. Abode in those days of the family of Latour, nesting there century after century, it recorded significantly the effectiveness of their brotherly union, less by way of invasion of the rights of others than by the improvement of all gentler sentiments within. From the sumptuous monuments of their last resting-place, backwards to every object which had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home it was visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities of the very ground-plan of the house itself—everywhere was the token of their anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathway through the world [2] which knit the wayfarers thereon most closely together.

Why this irregularity of ground-plan?—the traveller would ask; recognising indeed a certain distinction in its actual effect on the eye, and suspecting perhaps some conscious aim at such effect on the part of the builders of the place in an age indulgent of architectural caprices. And the traditional answer to the question, true for once, still showed the race of Latour making much, making the most, of the sympathetic ties of human life. The work, in large measure, of Gaston de Latour, it was left unfinished at his death, some time about the year 1594. That it was never completed could hardly be attributed to any lack of means, or of interest; for it is plain that to the period of the Revolution, after which its scanty remnants passed into humble occupation (a few circular turrets, a crenellated curtain wall, giving a random touch of dignity to some ordinary farm-buildings) the place had been scrupulously maintained. It might seem to have been a kind of reverence rather that had allowed the work to remain untouched for future ages precisely at this point in its growth.

And the expert architectural mind, peeping acutely into recondite motives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of that date, [3] a feudal fortress, but an unfortified manor-house—a double manoir—two houses, oddly associated at a right angle. Far back in the Middle Age, said a not uncertain tradition, here had been the one point of contact between two estates, intricately interlocked with alien domain, as, in the course of generations, the family of Latour, and another, had added field to field. In the single lonely manor then existing two brothers had grown up; and the time came when the marriage of the younger to the heiress of those neighbouring lands would divide two perfect friends. Regretting over-night so dislocating a change it was the elder who, as the drowsy hours flowed away in manifold recollection beside the fire, now suggested to the younger, himself already wistfully recalling, as from the past, the kindly motion and noise of the place like a sort of audible sunlight, the building of a second manor-house—the Château d'Amour, as it came to be called—that the two families, in what should be as nearly as possible one abode, might take their fortunes together.

Of somewhat finer construction than the rough walls of the older manor, the Château d'Amour stood, amid the change of years, as a visible record of all the accumulated sense of human existence among its occupants. The old walls, the old apartments, of those two associated houses still existed, with some obvious additions, beneath the delicate, fantastic surfaces of the château [4] of the sixteenth century. Its singularity of outline was the very symbol of the religion of the family in the race of Latour, still full of loyalty to the old home, as its numerous outgrowths took hold here and there around. A race with some prominent characteristics ineradicable in the grain, they went to raise the human level about them by a transfer of blood, far from involving any social decadence in themselves. A peculiar local variety of character, of manners, in that district of La Beauce, surprised the more observant visitor who might find his way into farmhouse or humble presbytery of its scattered townships. And as for those who kept up the central tradition of their house, they were true to the soil, coming back, under whatever obstacles, from court, from cloister, from distant crusade, to the visible spot where the memory of their kindred was liveliest and most exact—a memory, touched so solemnly with a conscience of the intimacies of life, its significant events, its contacts and partings, that to themselves it was like a second sacred history.

It was a great day, amid all their quiet days, for the people of Deux-manoirs—one of the later days of August. The event, which would mark it always in the life of one of them, called into play all that was most expressive in that well-defined family character: it was at once the recognition of what they valued most in past years, and an assertion of will, or hope, for the [5] future, accordant thereto. Far away in Paris the young King Charles the Ninth, in his fourteenth year, had been just declared of age. Here, in the church of Saint Hubert, church of their parish, and of their immemorial patronage, though it lay at a considerable distance from their abode, the chiefs of the house of Latour, attended by many of its dependents and less important members, were standing ready, around the last hope of their old age—the grandparents, their aged brothers and sisters, certain aged ecclesiastics of their kindred, wont to be called to the family councils.

They had set out on foot, after a votive mass said early in the old chapel of the manor, to assist at the ceremony of the day. Distinguishable from afar by unusual height in proportion to its breadth within, the church of Saint Hubert had an atmosphere, a daylight, to itself. Its stained glass, work of the same hands that had wrought for the cathedral of Chartres, admitted only an almost angry ray of purple or crimson, here or there, across the dark, roomy spaces. The heart, the heart of youth at least, sank, as one entered, stepping warily out of the sunshine over the sepulchral stones which formed the entire pavement of the church, a great blazonry of family history from age to age for indefatigable eyes. An abundance of almost life-sized sculpture clung to the pillars, lurked in the angles, seemed, with those symbolical gestures, and mystic faces [6] ready to speak their parts, to be almost in motion through the gloom. Many years after, Gaston de Latour, an enemy of all Gothic darkness or heaviness, returning to his home full of a later taste, changed all that. A thicket of airy spires rose above the sanctuary; the blind triforium broke into one continuous window; the heavy masses of stone were pared down with wonderful dexterity of hand, till not a hand's-breadth remained uncovered by delicate tracery, as from the fair white roof, touched sparingly with gold, down to the subterranean chapel of Saint Taurin, where the peasants of La Beauce came to pray for rain, not a space was left unsearched by cheerful daylight, refined, but hardly dimmed at all, by painted glass mimicking the clearness of the open sky. In the sombre old church all was in stately order now: the dusky, jewelled reliquaries, the ancient devotional ornaments from the manor—much-prized family possessions, sufficient to furnish the whole array of a great ecclesiastical function like this—the lights burning, flowers everywhere, gathered amid the last handfuls of the harvest by the peasant-women, who came to present their children for the happy chance of an episcopal blessing.

And the almost exclusively aged people, in all their old personal adornments, which now so rarely saw the light, forming the central group, expectant around the young seigneur they had conducted hither, seemed of one piece with [7] those mystic figures, the old, armour- clad monumental effigies, the carved and painted imageries which ran round the outer circuit of the choir—a version of the biblical history, for the reading of those who loitered on their way from chapel to chapel. There was Joseph's dream, with the tall sheaves of the elder brethren bowing to Joseph's sheaf, like these aged heads around the youthful aspirant of to-day. There was Jacob going on his mysterious way, met by, conversing with, wrestling with, the Angels of God—rescuing the promise of his race from the "profane" Esau. There was the mother of Samuel, and, in long white ephod, the much- desired, early-consecrated child, who had inherited her religious capacity; and David, with something of his extraordinary genius for divine things written on his countenance; onward, to the sacred persons of the Annunciation, with the golden lily in the silver cup, only lately set in its place. With dress, expression, nay! the very incidents themselves innocently adapted to the actual habits and associations of the age which had produced them, these figures of the old Jewish history seemed about to take their places, for the imparting of a divine sanction, among the living actors of the day. One and all spoke of ready concurrence with religious motions, a ready apprehension of, and concurrence with, the provisions of a certain divine scheme for the improvement of one's opportunities in the world.

[8] Would that dark-haired, fair-skinned lad concur, in his turn, and be always true to his present purpose—Gaston de Latour, standing thus, almost the only youthful thing, amid the witness of these imposing, meditative, masks and faces? Could his guardians have read below the white propriety of the youth, duly arrayed for dedication, with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice folded over his left shoulder, he might sorely have disturbed their placid but somewhat narrow ruminations, with the germs of what was strange to or beyond them. Certain of those shrewd old ecclesiastics had in fact detected that the devout lad, so visibly impressed, was not altogether after their kind; that, together with many characteristics obviously inherited, he possessed—had caught perhaps from some ancestor unrepresented here—some other potencies of nature, which might not always combine so accordantly as to-day with the mental requisites of an occasion such as this. One of them, indeed, touched notwithstanding by his manifest piety just then, shortly afterwards recommended him a little prayer "for peace" from the Vespers of the Roman Breviary—for the harmony of his heart with itself; advice which, except for a very short period, he ever afterwards followed, saying it every evening of his life.

Yet it was the lad's own election which had led him to this first step in a career that might take him out of the world and end the race of [9] Latour altogether. Approaching their fourscore years, and realising almost suddenly the situation of the young Gaston, left there alone, out of what had been a large, much-promising, resonant household, they wished otherwise, but did not try to change his early-pronounced preference for the ecclesiastical calling. When he determined to seek the clericature, his proposal made a demand on all their old-fashioned religious sentiment. But the fund was a deep one, and their acquiescence in the result entire. He might indeed use his privilege of "orders" only as the stepping-stone to material advancement in a church which seemed to have gone over wholly to the world, and of which at that time one half the benefices were practically in the hands of laymen. But, actually, the event came to be a dedication on their part, not unlike those old biblical ones—an offering in old age of the single precious thing left them; the grandchild, whose hair would presently fall under the very shears which, a hundred years before, had turned an earlier, brilliant, Gaston de Latour into a monk.

Charles Guillard, Bishop of Chartres, a courtly, vivacious prelate, whose quick eyes seemed to note at a glance the whole assembly, one and all, while his lips moved silently, arrived at last, and the rite began with the singing of the Office for the Ninth Hour. It was like a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty way—Mirabilia testimonia tua! In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly [10] fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout hour, from the sordid languor and the mean business of men's lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the divine righteousness, which had still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night but alert in the drowsy afternoon. Yes! there was the sheep astray, sicut ovis quae periit—the physical world; with its lusty ministers, at work, or sleeping for a while amid the stubble, their faces upturned to the August sun—the world so importunately visible, intruding a little way, with its floating odours, in that semicircle of heat across the old over-written pavement at the great open door, upon the mysteries within. Seen from the incense-laden sanctuary, where the bishop was assuming one by one the pontifical ornaments, La Beauce, like a many- coloured carpet spread under the great dome, with the white double house-front quivering afar through the heat, though it looked as if you might touch with the hand its distant spaces, was for a moment the unreal thing. Gaston alone, with all his mystic preoccupations, by the privilege of youth, seemed to belong to both, and link the visionary company about him to the external scene.

The rite with which the Roman Church "makes a clerk," aims certainly at no low measure of difference from the coarser world around him, in its supposed scholar: and in this case the [11] aspirant (the precise claims of the situation being well considered) had no misgiving. Discreetly, and with full attention, he answers Adsum! when his name is called, and advances manfully; though he kneels meekly enough, and remains, with his head bowed forward, at the knees of the seated bishop who recites the appointed prayers, between the anthems and responses of his Schola, or attendant singers—Might he be saved from mental blindness! Might he put on the new man, even as his outward guise was changed! Might he keep the religious habit for ever! who had thus hastened to lay down the hair of his head for the divine love. "The Lord is my inheritance" whispers Gaston distinctly, as the locks fall, cut from the thickly-grown, black head, in five places, "after the fashion of Christ's crown," the shears in the episcopal hands sounding aloud, amid the silence of the curious spectators. From the same hands, in due order, the fair surplice ripples down over him. "This is the generation of them that seek Him," the choir sings: "The Lord Himself is the portion of my inheritance and my cup." It was the Church's eloquent way of bidding unrestricted expansion to the youthful heart in its timely purpose to seek the best, to abide among the things of the spirit.

The prospect from their cheerful, unenclosed road, like a white scarf flung across the land, as [12] the party returned home in the late August afternoon, was clear and dry and distant. The great barns at the wayside had their doors thrown back, displaying the dark, cool space within. The farmsteads seemed almost tenantless, the villagers being still at work over the immense harvest-field. Crazy bells startled them, striking out the hour from behind, over a deserted churchyard. Still and tenantless also seemed the manor as they approached, door and window lying open upon the court for the coolness; or rather it was as if at their approach certain spectral occupants started back out of the daylight—"Why depart, dear ghosts?" was what the grandparents would have cried. They had more in common with that immaterial world than with flesh and blood. There was room for the existing household, enough and to spare, in one of the two old houses. That other, the Château d'Amour, remained for Gaston, at first as a delightful, half-known abode of wonders, though with some childish fear; afterwards, as a delightful nursery of refined or fantastic sentiment, as he recalled, in this chamber or that, its old tenants and their doings, from the affectionate brothers, onwards—above all, how in one room long ago Gabrielle de Latour had died of joy.

With minds full of their recent business it was difficult to go back to common occupations; as darkness came on, the impressions of the day did but return again more vividly and concentrate [13] themselves upon the inward sense. Observance, loyal concurrence in some high purpose for him, passive waiting on the hand one might miss in the darkness, with the gift or gifts therein of which he had the presentiment, and upon the due acceptance of which the true fortune of life would turn; these were the hereditary traits alert in Gaston, as he lay awake in the absolute, moon-lit, stillness, his outward ear attentive for the wandering footsteps which, through that wide, lightly-accentuated country, often came and went about the house, with weird suggestions of a dim passage to and fro, and of an infinite distance. He would rise, as the footsteps halted perhaps below his window, to answer the questions of the travellers, pilgrims, or labourers who had missed their way from farm to farm, or halting soldier seeking guidance; terrible or terror-stricken companies sometimes, rudely or piteously importunate to be let in— for it was the period of the Religious Wars, flaming up here and there over France, and never quite put out, during forty years.

Once, in the beginning of these troubles (he was then a child, leaning from the window, as a sound of rickety, small wheels approached) the enquiry came in broken French, "Voulez-vous donner direction?" from a German, one of the mercenaries of the Duc de Guise, hired for service in a civil strife of France, drawing wearily a crippled companion, so far from home. [14] The memory of it, awakening a thousand strange fancies, had remained by him, as a witness to the power of fortuitous circumstance over the imagination.

One night there had come a noise of horns, and presently King Charles himself was standing in the courtyard, belated, and far enough now from troublesome company, as he hunted the rich-fleshed game of La Beauce through the endless corn. He entered, with a relish for the pleasant cleanliness of the place, expressed in a shrill strain of half-religious oaths, like flashes of hell-fire to Gaston's suddenly- awakened sense. It was the invincible nature of the royal lad to speak, and feel, on these mad, alto notes, and not unbecoming in a good catholic; for Huguenots never swore, and these were subtly theological oaths. Well! the grandparents repressed as best they could their apprehensions as to what other hunters, what other disconcerting incident, might follow; for catholic France very generally believed that the Huguenot leaders had a scheme for possessing themselves of the person of the young king, known to be mentally pliable. Meanwhile they led him to their daintiest apartment, with great silver flambeaux, that he might wash off the blood with which not his hands only were covered; for he hunted also with the eagerness of a madman—steeped in blood. He lay there for a few hours, after supping very familiarly on his own birds, Gaston rising from [15] his bed to look on at a distance, and, afterwards, on his knee, serving the rose-water dish and spiced wine, as the night passed in reassuring silence; Charles himself, as usual, keenly enjoying this "gipsy" incident, with the supper after that unexpected fashion, among strange people, he hardly knew where. He was very pale, like some cunning Italian work in wax or ivory, of partly satiric character, endued by magic or crafty mechanism with vivacious movement. But as he sat thus, ever for the most part the unhappy plaything of other people's humours, escaped for a moment out of a world of demoniac politicians, the pensive atmosphere around seemed gradually to change him, touching his wild temper, pleasantly, profitably, so that he took down from the wall and struck out the notes of a lute, and fell to talking of verses, leaving a stanza of his own scratched with a diamond on the window-pane—lines simpler- hearted, and more full of nature than were common at that day.

The life of Gaston de Latour was almost to coincide with the duration of the Religious Wars. The earliest public event of his memory was that famous siege of Orleans from which the young Henri de Guise rode away the head of his restless family, tormented now still further by the reality or the pretence of filial duty, seeking vengeance on the treacherous murder of his father. Following a long period of quiet progress—the tranquil and tolerant years of the [16] Renaissance— the religious war took possession of, and pushed to strangely confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by an artificial aesthetic culture; and filled with wild passions, wildly-dramatic personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare of foreign mercenaries and armed peasants. It was a curiously refined people who now took down the armour, hanging high on the wall for decoration among newer things so little warlike.

A difficult age, certainly, for scrupulous spirits to move in! A perplexed network of partizan or personal interests underlay, and furnished the really directing forces in, a supposed Armageddon of contending religious convictions. The wisest perhaps, like Michel de L'Hôpital, withdrew themselves from a conflict, in which not a single actor has the air of quite pure intentions; while religion, itself the assumed ground of quarrel, seems appreciable all the while only by abstraction from the parties, the leaders, at once violent [17] and cunning, who are most pretentious in the assertion of its rival claims. What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the so-called "Political" party, professedly almost indifferent to it, but which had at least something of humanity on its side, and some chance of that placidity of mind in which alone the business of the spirit can be done. The new sect of "Papists" were not the true catholics: there was little of the virtue of the martyr in militant Calvinism. It is not a catholic historian who notes with profound regret "that inauspicious day," in the year 1562, Gaston's tenth year, "when the work of devastation began, which was to strip from France that antique garniture of religious art which later ages have not been able to replace." Axe and hammer at the carved work sounded from one end of France to the other.

It was a peculiarity of this age of terror, that every one, including Charles the Ninth himself, dreaded what the accident of war might make, not merely of his enemies, but of temporary allies and pretended friends, in an evenly balanced but very complex strife—of merely personal rivals also, in some matter which had nothing to do with the assumed motives of that strife. Gaston de Latour passing on his country way one night, with a sudden flash of fierce words two young men burst from the doors of a road-side tavern. The brothers are quarrelling about [18] the division, lately effected there, of their dead father's morsel of land. "I shall hate you till death!" cries the younger, bounding away in the darkness; and two atheists part, to take opposite sides in the supposed strife of Catholic and Huguenot.

The deeds of violence which occupy the foreground of French history during the reigns of Catherine's sons might indeed lead one to fancy that little human kindness could have remained in France,—a fanatical civil war of forty years, that no place at all could have been left for the quiet building of character. Contempt for human life, taught us every day by nature, and alas! by man himself:—all war intensifies that. But the more permanent forces, alike of human nature and of the natural world, are on the whole in the interest of tranquillity and sanity, and of the sentiments proper to man. Like all good catholic children, Gaston had shuddered at the name of Adretz, of Briquemaut with his great necklace of priests' ears, of that dark and fugitive Montgomeri, the slayer, as some would have it the assassin, of a king, now active, and almost ubiquitous, on the Huguenot side. Still, at Deux-manoirs, this warfare, seething up from time to time so wildly in this or that district of France, was for the most part only sensible in incidents we might think picturesque, were they told with that intention; delightful enough, certainly, to the curiosity of a boy, in whose [19] mind nevertheless they deepened a native impressibility to the sorrow and hazard that are constant and necessary in human life, especially for the poor. The troubles of "that poor people of France"—burden of all its righteous rulers, from Saint Lewis downwards—these, at all events, would not be lessened by the struggle of Guise and Condé and Bourbon and Valois, of the Valois with each other, of those four brilliant young princes of the name of Henry. The weak would but suffer somewhat more than was usual, in the interest of the strong. If you were not sure whether that gleaming of the sun in the vast distance flashed from swords or sickles, whether that far-off curl of smoke rose from stubble-fire or village-steeple, to protect which the peasants, still lovers of their churches, would arm themselves, women and all, with fork and scythe,—still, those peasants used their scythes, in due season, for reaping their leagues of cornland, and slept with faces as tranquil as ever towards the sky, for their noonday rest. In effect, since peace is always in some measure dependent on one's own seeking, disturbing forces do but fray their way along somewhat narrow paths over the great spaces of the quiet realm of nature. La Beauce, vast enough to present at once every phase of weather, its one landmark the twin spires of Chartres, salient as the finger of a dial, guiding, by their change of perspective, victor or vanquished on his way, offered room enough [20] for the business both of peace and war to those enamoured of either. When Gaston, after a brief absence, was unable to find his child's garden-bed, that was only because in a fine June the corn had grown tall so quickly, through which he was presently led to it, with all its garish sweets undisturbed: and it was with the ancient growths of mind—customs, beliefs, mental preferences—as with the natural world.

It may be understood that there was a certain rudeness about the old manor, left almost untouched from age to age, with a loyalty which paid little or no heed to changes of fashion. The Château d'Amour, indeed, as the work of a later age, refined somewhat upon the rough feudal architecture; and the daintier taste had centred itself in particular upon one apartment, a veritable woman's apartment, with an effect in some degree anticipating the achievement of Gaston's own century, in which the apparatus of daily life became so eloquent of the moods of those to whom it ministered. It was the chamber of Gabrielle de Latour, who had died of joy. Here certainly she had watched, at these windows, during ten whole years, for the return of her beloved husband from a disastrous battle in the East, till against all expectation she beheld him crossing the court at last. Immense privilege! Immense distinction! Again and again Gaston tried to master the paradox, at times, in deep concentration of mind, seemed [21] almost to touch the point of that wonderful moment.

Hither, as to an oratory, a religious place, the finer spirits of her kin had always found their way, to leave behind them there the more intimate relics of themselves. To Gaston its influence imparted early a taste for delicate things as being indispensable in all his pleasures to come; and, from the very first, with the appetite for some great distinguishing passion, the peculiar genius of his age seeming already awake spontaneously within him. Here, at least, had been one of those grand passions, such as were needed to give life its true meaning and effect. Conscious of that rudeness in his home, and feeding a strong natural instinct for outward beauty hitherto on what was barely sufficient, he found for himself in this perfumed place the centre of a fanciful world, reaching out to who could tell what refined passages of existence in that great world beyond, of which the echoes seemed to light here amid the stillness. On his first visit one pensive afternoon, fitting the lately attained key in the lock, he seemed to have drawn upon himself, yet hardly to have disturbed, the meditations of its former occupant. A century of unhindered summers had taken the heat from its colours—the couches, the curtains half shading the windows, which the rain in the south- west wind just then touched so softly. That great passion of old had been also a dainty love, leaving [22] its impress everywhere in this magic apartment, on the musical instruments, the books lying where they might have fallen from the hands of the listless reader so long since, the fragrance which the lad's movement stirred around him. And there, on one of the windows, were the verses of King Charles, who had slept here, as in the most courtly resting-place of the house. On certain nights Gaston himself was not afraid to steal from his own bed to lie in it, though still too healthy a sleeper to be visited by the appropriate dreams he so greatly longed for.

A nature, instinctively religious, which would readily discover and give their full value to all such facts of experience as might be conformable thereto! But what would be the relation of this religious sensibility to sensibilities of another kind, now awaking in the young Gaston, as he mused in this dreamy place, surrounded by the books, the furniture, almost the very presence of the past, which had already found tongues to speak of a still living humanity— somewhere, somewhere, in the world!—waiting for him in the distance, or perchance already on its way, to explain, by its own plenary beauty and power, why wine and roses and the languorous summer afternoons were so delightful. So far indeed, the imaginative heat, that might one day enter into dangerous rivalry with simple old- fashioned faith, was blent harmoniously with it. They [23] were hardly distinguishable elements of an amiable character, susceptible generally to the poetic side of things—two neighbourly apprehensions of a single ideal.

The great passions, the fervid sentiments, of which Gaston dreamed as the true realisation of life, have not always softened men's natures: they have been compatible with many cruelties, as in the lost spirits of that very age. They may overflow, on the other hand, in more equable natures, through the concurrence of happier circumstance, into that universal sympathy which lends a kind of amorous power to the homeliest charities. So it seemed likely to be with Gaston de Latour. Sorrow came along with beauty, a rival of its intricate omnipresence in life. In the sudden tremor of an aged voice, the handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the tacit observance of a day, he became aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world. For once the darling of old age actually more than responded in full to its tenderness. In the isolation of his life there had been little demand for sympathy on the part of those anywhere near his own age. So much the larger was the fund of superfluous affection which went forth, with a delicacy not less than their own, to meet the sympathies of the aged people who cherished him. In him, their old, almost forgotten sorrows bled anew.

[24] Variety of affection, in a household in which many relations had lived together, had brought variety of sorrow. But they were well- nigh healed now—those once so poignant griefs—the scars remaining only as deeper lines of natural expression. It was visible, to their surprise, that he penetrated the motive of the mass said so solemnly, in violet, on the Innocents' Day, and understood why they wept at the triumphant antiphons:—"My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler!"—thinking intently of the little tombs which had recorded carefully almost the minutes of children's lives, Elizabeth de Latour, Cornélius de Latour, aged so many years, days, hours. Yes! the cold pavement under one's feet had once been molten lava. Surely the resources of sorrow were large in things! The fact must be duly marked and provided for, with due estimate of his own susceptibility thereto, in his scheme of life. Might he pass through the world, unriven by sorrows such as those! And already it was as if he stept softly over the earth, not to outrage its so abundant latent sensibilities.

The beauty of the world and its sorrow, solaced a little by religious faith, itself so beautiful a thing; these were the chief impressions with which he made his way outwards, at first only in longer rambles, as physical strength increased, over his native plains, whereon, as we have seen, the cruel warfare of that age had [25] aggravated at a thousand points the everyday appeal of suffering humanity. The vast level, stretching thirty miles from east to west, thirty from north to south:—perhaps the reader may think little of its resources for the seeker after natural beauty, or its capacity to develope the imagination. A world, he may fancy, in which there could be no shadows, at best not too cheerful colours. In truth, it was all accent, so to speak. But then, surely, all the finer influences of every language depend mostly on accent; and he has but to think of it as Gaston actually lived in it to find a singularly companionable soul there. Gaston, at least, needed but to go far enough across it for those inward oppositions to cease, which already at times beset him; to feel at one with himself again, under the influence of a scene which had for him something of the character of the sea—its changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traversed it. Featureless, if you will, it was always under the guidance of its ample sky. Scowling back sometimes moodily enough, but almost never without a remnant of fine weather, about August it was for the most part cloudless. And then truly, under its blue dome, the great plain would as it were "laugh and sing," in a kind of absoluteness of sympathy with the sun.

II. OUR LADY'S CHURCH

[26] Like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, thought the child, everywhere the great church of Chartres was visible, with the passing light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces. The people of La Beauce were proud, and would talk often of its rich store of sacred furniture, the wonder-working relics of "Our Lady under the Earth," and her sacred veil or shift, which kings and princes came to visit, returning with a likeness thereof, replete in miraculous virtue, for their own wearing. The busy fancy of Gaston, multiplying this chance hearsay, had set the whole interior in array—a dim, spacious, fragrant place, afloat with golden lights. Lit up over the autumn fields at evening, the distant spires suggested the splendour within, with so strong an imaginative effect, that he seemed scarcely to know whether it was through the mental or bodily eye that he beheld. When he came [27] thither at last, like many another well- born youth, to join the episcopal household as a kind of half- clerical page, he found (as happens in the actual testing of our ideals) at once more and less than he had supposed; and his earlier vision was a thing he could never precisely recover, or disentangle from the supervening reality. What he saw, certainly, was greater far in mere physical proportion, and incommensurable at first by anything he knew—the volume of the wrought detail, the mass of the component members, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry, contrary to the usual Gothic manner, and as if in reminiscence of those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for her. Through repeated dangers good-fortune has saved that unrivalled treasure of stained glass; and then, as now, the word "awful," so often applied to Gothic aisles, was for once really applicable. You enter, looking perhaps for a few minutes' cool shelter from the summer noonday; and the placid sunshine of La Beauce seems to have been transformed in a moment into imperious, angry fire.

It was not in summer, however, that Gaston first set foot there; he saw the beautiful city for the first time as if sheathed austerely in repellent armour. In his most genial subsequent impressions of the place there was always a lingering [28] trace of that famous frost through which he made his way, wary of petrifying contact against things without, to the great western portal, on Candlemas morning. The sad, patient images by the doorways of the crowded church seemed suffering now chiefly from the cold. It was almost like a funeral— the penitential violet, the wandering taper-light, of this half- lenten feast of Purification. His new companions, at the head and in the rear of the long procession, forced every one, even the Lord Bishop himself, to move apace, bustling along, cross-bearer and acolyte, in their odd little copes, out of the bitter air, which made the jolly life Gaston now entered on, around the great fire of their hall in the episcopal palace, seem all the more winsome.

Notre-Dame de Chartres! It was a world to explore, as if one explored the entire Middle Age; it was also one unending, elaborate, religious function—a life, or a continuous drama, to take one's part in. Dependent on its structural completeness, on its wealth of well- preserved ornament, on its unity in variety, perhaps on some undefinable operation of genius, beyond, but concurrently with, all these, the church of Chartres has still the gift of a unique power of impressing. In comparison, the other famous churches of France, at Amiens for instance, at Rheims or Beauvais, may seem but formal, and to a large extent reproducible, effects of mere architectural rule on a gigantic scale. The [29] somewhat Gothic soul of Gaston relished there something strange, or even bizarre, in the very manner in which the building set itself, so broadly couchant, upon the earth; in the natural richness of tone on the masonry within; in its vast echoing roof of timber, the "forest," as it was called; in the mysterious maze traced upon its pavement; its maze-like crypt, centering in the shrine of the sibylline Notre-Dame, itself a natural or very primitive grotto or cave. A few years were still to pass ere sacrilegious hands despoiled it on a religious pretext:—the catholic church must pay, even with the molten gold of her sanctuaries, the price of her defence in the civil war. At present, it was such a treasure-house of medieval jewellery as we have to make a very systematic effort even to imagine. The still extant register of its furniture and sacred apparel leaves the soul of the ecclesiologist athirst.

And it had another very remarkable difference from almost all Gothic churches: there were no graves there. Its emptiness in this respect is due to no revolutionary or Huguenot desecration. Once indeed, about this very time, a popular military leader had been interred with honour, within the precinct of the high altar itself. But not long afterwards, said the reverend canons, resenting on the part of their immaculate patroness this intrusion, the corpse itself, ill at ease, had protested, lifting up its hands above [30] the surface of the pavement, as if to beg interment elsewhere; and Gaston could remember assisting, awakened suddenly one night, at the removal of the remains to a more ordinary place of sepulture.

And yet that lavish display of jewellers' work on the altars, in the chapels, the sacristies, of Our Lady's Church, was but a framing for little else than dead people's bones. To Gaston, a piteous soul, with a touch also of that grim humour which, as we know, holds of pity, relic-worship came naturally. At Deux-manoirs too there had been relics, including certain broken children's toys and some rude childish drawings, taken forth now and then with almost religious veneration, with trembling hands and renewal of old grief, to his wondering awe at the greatness of men's sorrows. Yes! the pavement under one's feet had once been, might become again for him, molten lava. The look, the manner, of those who exposed these things, had been a revelation. The abundant relics of the church of Chartres were for the most part perished remnants of the poor human body itself; but, appertaining to persons long ago and of a far-off, immeasurable kind of sanctity, stimulated a more indifferent sort of curiosity, and seemed to bring the distant, the impossible, as with tangible evidence of fact, close to one's side. It was in one's hand—the finger of an Evangelist! The crowned head of Saint Lubin, bishop of Chartres [31] long centuries since, but still able to preserve its wheat-stacks from fire; bones of the "Maries," with some of the earth from their grave; these, and the like of these, was what the curious eye discerned in the recesses of those variously contrived reliquaries, great and small, glittering so profusely about the dusky church, itself ministering, by its very shadows, to a certain appetite in the soul of Gaston for dimness—for a dim place like this—such as he had often prefigured to himself, albeit with some suspicion of what might seem a preference for darkness. Physical twilight we most of us love, in its season. To him, that perpetual twilight came in close identity with its moral or intellectual counterpart, as the welcome requisite for that part of the soul which loves twilight, and is, in truth, never quite at rest out of it, through some congenital uneasiness or distress, perhaps, in its processes of vision.

As complex, yet not less perfectly united under a single leading motive,—its sister volume, was the ritual order of Notre-Dame de Chartres, a year-long dramatic action, in which every one had, and knew, his part—the drama or "mystery" of Redemption, to the necessities of which the great church had shaped itself. All those various "offices" which, in Pontifical, Missal and Breviary, devout imagination had elaborated from age to age with such a range of spiritual colour and light and shade, with so much poetic tact in quotation, such a depth of insight into [32] the Christian soul, had joined themselves harmoniously together, one office ending only where another began, in the perpetual worship of this mother of churches, which had also its own picturesque peculiarities of "use," proud of its maternal privilege therein. And the music rose—warmed, expanded, or fell silent altogether—as the order of the year, the colours, the whole expression of things changed, gathering around the full mystic effulgence of the pontiff in his own person, while the sacred theme deepened at the great ecclesiastical seasons, when the aisles overflowed with a vast multitude, and like a court, combed, starched, rustling around him, Gaston and his fellows "served" Monseigneur—they, zealous, ubiquitous, more prominent than ever, though for the most part profoundly irreverent, and, notwithstanding that, one and all, with what disdain of the untonsured laity!

Well! what was of the past there—the actual stones of the temple and that sacred liturgical order—entered readily enough into Gaston's mental kingdom, filling places prepared by the anticipations of his tranquil, dream-struck youth. It was the present, the uncalculated present, which now disturbed the complacent habit of his thoughts, proposing itself, importunately, in the living forms of his immediate companions, in the great clerical body of which he was become a part, in the people of Chartres itself (none the less animated because provincial) as [33] a thing, alien at a thousand points from his preconceptions of life, to be judged by him, to be rejected or located within. How vivid, how delightful, they were!—the other forty-nine of the fifty lads who had come hither, after the old- fashioned way, to serve in the household of Monseigneur by way of an "institution" in learning and good manners, as to which a grave national assembly, more than three centuries before the States- General of 1789, had judged French youth of quality somewhat behindhand, recommending king and nobles to take better care for the future of their education, "to the end that, enlightened and moralised, they might know their duties, and be less likely to abuse their privileges."

And how becomingly that cleric pride, that self-respecting quiet, sat upon their high-bred figures, their angelic, unspoiled faces, saddened transiently as they came under the religious spell for a moment. As for Gaston, they welcomed him with perfect friendliness, kept their best side foremost for an hour, and would not leave his very dreams. In absolute unconsciousness, they had brought from their remote old homes all varieties of hereditary gifts, vices, distinctions, dark fates, mercy, cruelty, madness. Appetite and vanity abounded, but with an abundant superficial grace, befitting a generation which, as by some aesthetic sense in the air, made the most of the pleasant outsides of life. All the [34] various traits of the dying Middle Age were still in evidence among them, in all their crude effectiveness; only, blent, like rusty old armour wreathed in flowers, with the peculiar fopperies of the time, shrewdly divined from a distance, as happens with competent youth. To be in Paris itself, amid the full, delightful, fragrance of those dainty visible things which Huguenots despised:—that, surely, were the sum of good-fortune! Half-clerical, they loved nevertheless the touch of steel; had a laughing joy in trifling with its latent soul of destruction. In mimicry of the great world, they had their leaders, so inscrutably self-imposed:—instinctively, they felt and underwent that mystery of leadership, with its consequent heats of spirit, its tides and changes of influence.

On the other hand also, to Gaston, dreamily observant, it was quaint, likeable, the way they had of reproducing, unsuspectingly, the humours of animal nature. Does not the anthropologist tell us of a heraldry, with a large assortment of heraldic beasts, to be found among savage or half-savage peoples, as the "survival" of a period when men were nearer than they are or seem to be now, to the irrational world? Throughout the sprightly movement of the lads' daily life it was as if their "tribal" pets or monsters were with or within them. Tall Exmes, lithe and cruel like a tiger—it was pleasant to stroke him. The tiger was there, the parrot, the hare, the goat of course, and certainly much apishness. [35] And, one and all, they were like the creatures, in their vagrant, short, memories, alert perpetually on the topmost crest of the day and hour, transferred so heartlessly, so entirely, from yesterday to to-day. Yet out of them, sure of some response, human heart did break:—in and around Camille Pontdormi, for instance, brilliant and ambitious, yet so sensitive about his threadbare home, concerning which however he had made the whole company, one by one, his confidants—so loyal to the people there, bursting into wild tears over the letter which brought the news of his younger brother's death, visibly fretting over it long afterwards. Still, for the most part, in their perfect health, nothing seemed to reach them but their own boyish ordinances, their own arbitrary "form." It was an absolute indifference; most striking when they lifted their well-trained voices to sing in choir, vacant as the sparrows, while the eloquent, far-reaching, aspiring words floated melodiously from them, sometimes, with truly medieval license, singing to the sacred music those songs from the streets (no one cared to detect) which were really in their hearts. A world of vanity and appetite, yet after all of honesty with itself! Like grown people, they were but playing a game, and meant to observe its rules. Say, rather, a world of honesty, and of courage! They, at least, were not preoccupied all day long, and, if they woke in the night, with the fear of death.

[36] It was part of their precocious worldliness to recognise, to feel a little afraid of their new companion's intellectual power. Those obviously meditative souls, which seem "not to sleep o' nights," seldom fail to put others on their guard. Who can tell what they may be judging, planning in silence, so near to one? Looking back long afterwards across the dark period that had intervened, Gaston could trace their ways through the world. Not many of them had survived to his own middle life. Reappearing, from point to point, they connected themselves with the great crimes, the great tragedies of the time, as so many bright-coloured threads in that sombre tapestry of human passion. To recall in the obtuse, grieved, marred faces of uninteresting men or women, the disappointments, the sorrows, the tragic mistakes of the children they were long ago; that is a good trick for taking our own sympathy by surprise, which Gaston practised when he saw the last, or almost the last, of some of them, and felt a great pity, a great indulgence.

Here and now, at all events, carrying their cheerful tumult through all those quiet ecclesiastical places—the bishop's garden, the great sacristy, neat and clean in its brown, pensive lights, they seemed of a piece with the bright, simple, inanimate things, the toys, of nature. They made one lively picture with the fruit and wine they loved, the birds they captured, the buckets of clear water drawn for pastime from [37] the great well, and Jean Sémur's painted conjuring book stolen from the old sorceress, his grandmother, out of which he told their fortunes; with the musical instruments of others; with their carefully hidden dice and playing-cards, worn or soiled by the fingers of the older gamesters who had discarded them. Like their elders, they read eagerly, in racy, new translations, old Greek and Latin books, with a delightful shudder at the wanton paganism. It was a new element of confusion in the presentment of that miniature world. The classical enthusiasm laid hold on Gaston too, but essayed in vain to thrust out of him the medieval character of his experience, or put on quite a new face, insinuating itself rather under cover of the Middle Age, still in occupation all around him. Venus, Mars, Aeneas, haunted, in contemporary shape, like ghosts of folk one had known, the places with which he was familiar. Latin might still seem the fittest language for oratory, sixteen hundred years after Cicero was dead; those old Roman pontiffs, draped grandly, sat in the stalls of the choir; Propertius made love to Cynthia in the raiment of the foppish Amadée; they played Terence, and it was but a play within a play. Above all, in natural, heartfelt kinship with their own violent though refined and cunning time, they loved every incident of soldiering; while the changes of the year, the lights, the shadows, the flickering fires of winter, with [38] which Gaston had first associated his companions, so full of artificial enjoyment for the well-to-do, added themselves pleasantly, by way of shifting background, to the spectacular effect.

It was the brilliant surface with which the untried world confronted him. Touch it where you might, you felt the resistant force of the solid matter of human experience—of human experience, in its strange mixture of beauty and evil, its sorrow, its ill-assorted fates, its pathetic acquiescence; above all, in its overpowering certainty, over against his own world of echoes and shadows, which perhaps only seemed to be so much as echoes or shadows. A nature with the capacity of worship, he was straightway challenged, as by a rival new religion claiming to supersede the religion he knew, to identify himself conclusively with this so tangible world, its suppositions, its issues, its risks. Here was a world, certainly, which did not halt in meditation, but prompted one to make actual trial of it, with a liberty of heart which might likely enough traverse this or that precept (if it were not rather a mere scruple) of his earlier conscience. These its children, at all events, were, as he felt, in instinctive sympathy with its motions; had shrewd divinations of the things men really valued, and waited on them with unquestioning docility. Two worlds, two antagonistic ideals, were in evidence before him. Could a third condition supervene, to mend their discord, or [39] only vex him perhaps, from time to time, with efforts towards an impossible adjustment?

At a later date, Monseigneur Charles Guillard, then Bishop of Chartres, became something like a Huguenot, and ceased, with the concurrence of ecclesiastical authority, from his high functions. Even now he was but a protégé of King Charles in his relations to a more than suspicious Pope; and a rumour of the fact, reaching somehow these brisk young ears, had already set Gaston's mind in action, tremblingly, as to those small degrees, scarcely realisable perhaps one by one, though so immeasurable in their joint result, by which one might part from the "living vine"; and at times he started back, as if he saw his own benighted footsteps pacing lightly towards an awful precipice. At present, indeed, the assumption that there was sanctity in everything the kindly prelate touched, was part of the well-maintained etiquette of the little ecclesiastical court. But, as you meet in the street faces that are like a sacrament, so there are faces, looks, tones of voice, among dignified priests as among other people, to hear or look upon which is to feel the hypothesis of an unseen world impossible. As he smiled amiably out of the midst of his pontifical array on Gaston's scrupulous devotion, it was as if the old Roman augur smiled not only to his fellow augur but to the entire assistant world. In after years Gaston seemed to understand, and, as a consequence of [40] understanding, to judge his old patron equitably: the religious sense too, had its various species. The nephew of his predecessor in the see, with a real sense of the divine world but as something immeasurably distant, Monseigneur Guillard had been brought by maladroit worldly good-fortune a little too close to its immediate and visible embodiments. From afar, you might trace the divine agency on its way. But to touch, to handle it, with these fleshly hands:—well! for Monseigneur, that was by no means to believe because the thing was "incredible, or absurd." He had smiled, not certainly from irreverence, nor (a prelate for half his life) in conscious incredulity, but only in mute surprise, at an administration of divine graces—this administration in which he was a high priest—in itself, to his quite honest thinking, so unfitting, so improbable. And was it that Gaston too was a less independent ruler of his own mental world than he had fancied, that he derived his impressions of things not directly from them, but mediately from other people's impressions about them, and he needed the pledge of their assents to ratify his own? Only, could that, after all, be a real sun, at which other people's faces were not irradiated? And sometimes it seemed, with a riotous swelling of the heart, as if his own wondrous appetite in these matters had been deadened by surfeit, and there would be a pleasant sense of liberty, of escape out-of- doors, [41] could he be as little touched as almost all other people by Our Lady's Church, and old associations, and all those relics, and those dark, close, fragrant aisles.

At such times, to recall the winged visitant, gentle, yet withal sensitive to offence, which had settled on his youth with so deep a sense of assurance, he would climb the tower of Jean de Beauce, then fresh in all its array of airy staircase and pierced traceries, and great uncovered timbers, like some gigantic birdnest amid the stones, whence the large, quiet, country spaces became his own again, and the curious eye, at least, went home. He was become well aware of the power of those familiar influences in restoring equanimity, as he might have used a medicine or a wine. At each ascending storey, as the flight of the birds, the scent of the fields, swept past him, till he stood at last amid the unimpeded light and air of the watch- chamber above the great bells, some coil of perplexity, of unassimilable thought or fact, fell away from him. He saw the distant paths, and seemed to hear the breeze piping suddenly upon them under the cloudless sky, on its unseen, capricious way through those vast reaches of atmosphere. At this height, the low ring of blue hills was visible, with suggestions of that south-west country of peach-blossom and wine which had sometimes decoyed his thoughts towards the sea, and beyond it to "that new world of the Indies," [42] which was held to explain a certain softness in the air from that quarter, even in the most vehement weather. Amid those vagrant shadows and shafts of light must be Deux-manoirs, the deserted rooms, the gardens, the graves. In mid-distance, even then a funeral procession was on its way humbly to one of the village churchyards. He seemed almost to hear the words across the stillness.

They identified themselves, as with his own earliest prepossessions, so also with what was apt to present itself as being the common human prepossession—a certain finally authoritative common sense upon the quiet experience of things—the oldest, the most authentic, of all voices, audible always, if one stepped aside for a moment and got one's ears into what might after all be their normal condition. It might be heard, it would seem, in proportion as men were in touch with the Earth itself, in country life, in manual work upon it, above all by the open grave, as if, reminiscent of some older, deeper, more permanent ground of fact, it whispered then oracularly a certain secret to those who came into such close contact with it. Persistent after-thought! Would it always survive, amid the indifference of others, amid the verdicts of the world, amid a thousand doubts? It seemed to have found, and filled to overflowing, the soul of one amiable little child who had a kind of genius for tranquillity, and on his first coming hither had led Gaston to what he held to be the [43] choicest, pleasantest places, as being impregnable by noise. In his small stock of knowledge, he knew, like all around him, that he was going to die, and took kindly to the thought of a small grave in the little green close, as to a natural sleeping-place, in which he would be at home beforehand. Descending from the tower, Gaston knew he should find the child seated alone, enjoying the perfect quiet of the warm afternoon, for all the world was absent—gone forth to receive or gaze at a company of distinguished pilgrims.

Coming, sometimes with immense prelude and preparation, as when King Charles himself arrived to replace an image disfigured by profane Huguenots, sometimes with the secrecy and suddenness of an apparition vanished before the public was aware, the pilgrims to "Our Lady under the Earth" were the standing resource of those (such there were at Chartres as everywhere else) who must needs depend for the interest of their existence on the doings of their neighbours. A motley host, only needing their Chaucer to figure as a looking-glass of life, type against type, they brought with them, on the one hand, the very presence and perfume of Paris, the centre of courtly propriety and fashion; on the other hand, with faces which seemed to belong to another age, curiosities of existence from remote provinces of France, or Europe, from distant, half-fabulous lands, remoter still. Jules Damville, who would have liked best to be a sailor, [44] to command, not in any spiritual ark, but in the French fleet—should half-ruined France ever come to have one—led his companions one evening to inspect a strange maritime personage, stout and square, returned, contrary to all expectation, after ten years' captivity among the savages of Florida, kneeling among the lights at the shrine, with the frankness of a good child, his hair like a mat, his hands tattooed, his mahogany face seamed with a thousand weather- wrinklings, his outlandish offerings lying displayed around him.

Looking, listening, as they served them in the episcopal guest- chamber, those young clerks made wonderful leaps, from time to time, in manly knowledge. With what eager shrewdness they noted, discussed, reproduced, the manners and attire of their pilgrim guests, sporting what was to their liking therein in the streets of Chartres. The more cynical or supercilious pilgrim would sometimes present himself—a personage oftenest of high ecclesiastical station, like the eminent translator of Plutarch, Amyot, afterwards Bishop of Auxerre, who seemed to care little for shrine or relic, but lingered long over certain dim manuscripts in the canonical library, where our scholarly Gaston was of service, helping him directly to what he desired to see. And one morning early, visible at a distance to all the world, risen betimes to gaze, the Queen-mother and her three sons were [45] kneeling there—yearning, greedy, as ever, for a hundred diverse, perhaps incompatible, things. It was at the beginning of that winter of the great siege of Chartres, the morning on which the child Guy Debreschescourt died in his sleep. His tiny body—the placid, massive, baby head still one broad smile, the rest of him wrapped round together like a chrysalis—was put to rest finally, in a fold of the winding-sheet of a very aged person, deceased at the same hour.

For a hard winter, like that famous winter of 1567, the hardest that had been known for fifty years, makes an end of the weak—the aged, the very young. To the robust, how pleasant had the preparation for it seemed—the scent of the first wood-fire upon the keen October air; the earth turning from grey to black under the plough; the great stacks of fuel, come down lazily from the woods of Le Perche, along the winding Eure; its wholesome perfume; the long, soothing nights, and early twilight. The mind of Gaston, for one, was touched by the sense of some remote and delicate beauty in these things, like magicians' work, like an effect of magic as being extorted from unsuspected sources.

What winter really brought however, was the danger and vexation of a great siege. The householders of catholic Chartres had watched the forces of their Huguenot enemies gathering from this side and that; and at last the dreaded circle was complete. They were prisoners like [46] the rest, Gaston and the grandparents, shut up in their little hotel; and Gaston, face to face with it, understood at last what war really means. After all, it took them by surprise. It was early in the day. A crowd of worshippers filled the church of Sainte-Foy, built partly upon the ramparts; and at the conclusion of the mass, the Sacrament was to be carried to a sick person. Touched by unusual devotion at this perilous time, the whole assembly rose to escort the procession on its way, passing out slowly, group after group, as if by mechanical instinct, the more reluctant led on by the general consent. Gaston, the last lingerer, halting to let others proceed quietly before him, turned himself about to gaze upon the deserted church, half tempted to remain, ere he too stepped forth lightly and leisurely, when under a shower of massy stones from the coulevrines or great cannon of the besiegers, the entire roof of the place sank into the empty space behind him. But it was otherwise in a neighbouring church, crushed, in a similar way, with all its good people, not long afterwards.

And in the midst of the siege, with all its tumult about her, the old grandmother died, to the undissembled sorrow of Gaston, bereft, unexpectedly as it seemed, of the gentle creature, to whom he had always turned for an affection, that had been as no other in its absolute incapacity of offence. A tear upon the cheek, like [47] the bark of a tree, testified to some unfulfilled hope, something wished for but not to be, which left resignation, by nature or grace, still imperfect, and made death at fourscore years and ten seem, after all, like a premature summons in the midst of one's days. For a few hours, the peace which followed brought back to the face a protesting gleam of youth, far antecedent to anything Gaston could possibly have remembered there, moving him to a pity, a peculiar sense of pleading helplessness, which to the end of his life was apt to revive at the sight (it might be in an animal) of what must perforce remember that it had been young but was old.

That broken link with life seemed to end some other things for him. As one puts away the toys of childhood, so now he seemed to discard what had been the central influence of his earlier youth, what more than anything else had stirred imagination and brought the consciousness of his own life warm and full. Gazing now upon the "holy and beautiful place," as he had gazed on the dead face, for a moment he seemed to anticipate the indifference of age. And when not long after the rude hands of catholics themselves, at their wits' end for the maintenance of the "religious war," spoiled it of the accumulated treasure of centuries, leaving Notre-Dame de Chartres in the bareness with which we see it to-day, he had no keen sense of personal loss.

III. MODERNITY

[48] The besieging armies disappeared like the snow, leaving city and suburb in all the hardened soilure of war and winter, which only the torrents of spring would carry away. And the spring came suddenly: it was pleasant, after that long confinement, to walk afar securely through its early fervours. Gaston too went forth on his way home, not alone. Three chosen companions went with him, pledged to the old manor for months to come; its lonely ancient master welcoming readily the tread of youth about him.

"The Triumvirate":—so their comrades had been pleased to call the three; that term (delightful touch of classic colour on one's own trite but withal pedantic age) being then familiar, as the designation of three conspicuous agents on the political scene of the generation just departing. Only, these young Latinists went back for the associations of the word to its Roman original, to the three gallants of the distant time, rather than to those native French [49] heroes—Montmorenci, Saint-André, Guise—too close to them to seem really heroic. Mark Antony, knight of Venus, of Cleopatra; shifty Lepidus; bloody, yellow-haired Augustus, so worldly and so fine; you might find their mimic semblance, more easily than any suggestion of that threadbare triad of French adventurers, in the unfolding manhood of Jasmin, Amadée, and Camille.

They had detached themselves by an irresistible natural effectiveness from the surface of that youthful scholastic world around the episcopal throne of Chartres, carrying its various aptitudes as if to a perfect triple flower; restless Amadée de l'Autrec, who was to be a soldier, dazzled early into dangerous, rebellious paths by the iron ideal of the soldiers of "the religion," and even now fitting his blond prettiness to airs of Huguenot austerity; Camille Pontdormi, who meant to be a lawyer in an age in which certain legists had asserted an audacity of genius after a manner very captivating to youth with any appetite for predominance over its fellows—already winsomely starched a little, amid his courtly finery, of garb, and manner, and phrase; Jasmin de Villebon, who hardly knew what he meant to be, except perhaps a poet—himself, certainly, a poem for any competent reader. Vain,—yes! a little; and mad, said his companions, of course, with his clinging, exigent, lover's ways. It was he who had led the others on this visit to Gaston de Latour. Threads to [50] be cut short, one by one, before his eyes, the three would cross and recross, gaily, pathetically, in the tapestry of Gaston's years; and, divided far asunder afterwards, seemed at this moment, moving there before him in the confidential talk he could not always share, inseparably linked together, like some complicated pictorial arabesque, under the common light, of their youth, and of the morning, and of their sympathetic understanding of the visible world.

So they made their way, under the rows of miraculous white thorn- blossom, and through the green billows, at peace just then, though the war still blazed or smouldered along the southern banks of the Loire and far beyond, and it was with a delightful sense of peril, of prowess attested in the facing of it, that they passed from time to time half-ruined or deserted farm-buildings where the remnants of the armies might yet be lingering. It was Jasmin, poetic Jasmin, who, in giving Gaston the book he now carried ever ready to hand, had done him perhaps the best of services, for it had proved the key to a new world of seemingly boundless intellectual resources, and yet with a special closeness to visible or sensuous things;—the scent and colour of the field-flowers, the amorous business of the birds, the flush and re-fledging of the black earth itself in that fervent springtide, which was therefore unique in Gaston's memory. It was his intellectual springtide; as people look back to [51] a physical spring, which for once in ten or fifteen years, for once in a lifetime, was all that spring could be.

The book was none other than Pierre de Ronsard's "Odes," with "Mignonne! allons voir si la Rose," and "The Skylark" and the lines to April—itself verily like nothing so much as a jonquil, in its golden-green binding and yellow edges and perfume of the place where it had lain—sweet, but with something of the sickliness of all spring flowers since the days of Proserpine. Just eighteen years old, and the work of the poet's own youth, it took possession of Gaston with the ready intimacy of one's equal in age, fresh at every point; and he experienced what it is the function of contemporary poetry to effect anew for sensitive youth in each succeeding generation. The truant and irregular poetry of his own nature, all in solution there, found an external and authorised mouthpiece, ranging itself rightfully, as the latest achievement of human soul in this matter, along with the consecrated poetic voices of the past.

Poetry! Hitherto it had seemed hopelessly chained to the bookshelf, like something in a dead language, "dead, and shut up in reliquaries of books," or like those relics "one may only see through a little pane of glass," as one of its recent "liberators" had said. Sure, apparently, of its own "niche in the temple of Fame," the recognised poetry of literature had had the [52] pretension to defy or discredit, as depraved and irredeemably vulgar, the poetic motions in the living genius of to-day. Yet the genius of to-day, extant and forcible, the wakeful soul of present time consciously in possession, would assert its poetic along with all its other rights; and in regard to the curiosity, the intellectual interest, of Gaston, for instance, it had of course the advantage of being close at hand, with the effectiveness of a personal presence. Studious youth, indeed, on its mettle about "scholarship," though actually of listless humour among books that certainly stirred the past, makes a docile act of faith regarding the witchery, the thaumaturgic powers, of Virgil, or may we say of Shakespeare? Yet how faint and dim, after all, the sorrows of Dido, of Juliet, the travail of Aeneas, beside quite recent things felt or done—stories which, floating to us on the light current of to-day's conversation, leave the soul in a flutter! At best, poetry of the past could move one with no more directness than the beautiful faces of antiquity which are not here for us to see and unaffectedly love them. Gaston's demand (his youth only conforming to pattern therein) was for a poetry, as veritable, as intimately near, as corporeal, as the new faces of the hour, the flowers of the actual season. The poetry of mere literature, like the dead body, could not bleed, while there was a heart, a poetic heart, in the living world, which beat, bled, spoke with irresistible power. Elderly [53] people, Virgil in hand, might assert professionally that the contemporary age, an age, of course, of little people and things, deteriorate since the days of their own youth, must necessarily be unfit for poetic uses. But then youth, too, had its perpetual part to play, protesting that, after all said, the sun in the air, and in its own veins, was still found to be hot, still begetting, upon both alike, flowers and fruit; nay! visibly new flowers, and fruit richer than ever. Privately, in fact, Gaston had conceived of a poetry more thaumaturgic than could be anything of earlier standing than himself. The age renews itself; and in immediate derivation from it a novel poetry also grows superb and large, to fill a certain mental situation made ready in advance. Yes! the acknowledged, and, so to call it, legitimate, poetry of literature was but a thing he might sip at, like some sophisticated rarity in the way of wine, for example, pleasing the acquired taste. It was another sort of poetry, unexpressed, perhaps inexpressible, certainly not hitherto made known in books, that must drink up and absorb him, like the joyful air—him, and the earth, with its deeds, its blossoms, and faces.

In such condition of mind, how deeply, delightfully, must the poetry of Ronsard and his fellows have moved him, when he became aware, as from age to age inquisitive youth by good luck does become aware, of the literature of his own day, confirming—more than confirming— [54] anticipation! Here was a poetry which boldly assumed the dress, the words, the habits, the very trick, of contemporary life, and turned them into gold. It took possession of the lily in one's hand, and projecting it into a visionary distance, shed upon the body of the flower the soul of its beauty. Things were become at once more deeply sensuous and more deeply ideal. As at the touch of a wizard, something more came into the rose than its own natural blush. Occupied so closely with the visible, this new poetry had so profound an intuition of what can only be felt, and maintained that mood in speaking of such objects as wine, fruit, the plume in the cap, the ring on the finger. And still that was no dubious or generalised form it gave to flower or bird, but the exact pressure of the Jay at the window; you could count the petals,—of the exact natural number; no expression could be too faithful to the precise texture of things; words, too, must embroider, be twisted and spun, like silk or golden hair. Here were real people, in their real, delightful attire, and you understood how they moved; the visible was more visible than ever before, just because soul had come to its surface. The juice in the flowers, when Ronsard named them, was like wine or blood. It was such a coloured thing; though the grey things also, the cool things, all the fresher for the contrast—with a freshness, again, that seemed to touch and cool the soul—found their account [55] there; the clangorous passage of the birds at night foretokening rain, the moan of the wind at the door, the wind's self made visible over the yielding corn.

It was thus Gaston understood the poetry of Ronsard, generously expanding it to the full measure of its intention. That poetry, too, lost its thaumaturgic power in turn, and became mere literature in exchange for life, partly in the natural revolution of poetic taste, partly for its faults. Faults and all, however, Gaston loyally accepted it; those faults—the lapse of grace into affectation, of learning into pedantry, of exotic fineness into a trick—counting with him as but the proof of faith to its own dominant positions. They were but characteristics, needing no apology with the initiated, or welcome even, as savouring of the master's peculiarities of perfection. He listened, he looked round freely, but always now with the ear, the eye, of his favourite poet. It had been a lesson, a doctrine, the communication of an art,—the art of placing the pleasantly aesthetic, the welcome, elements of life at an advantage, in one's view of it, till they seemed to occupy the entire surface; and he was sincerely grateful for an undeniable good service.

And yet the gifted poet seemed but to have spoken what was already in Gaston's own mind, what he had longed to say, had been just going to say; so near it came, that it had the charm [56] of a discovery of one's own. That was an illusion, perhaps; it was because the poet told one so much about himself, making so free a display of what though personal was very contagious; of his love-secrets especially, how love and nothing else filled his mind. He was in truth but "love's secretary," noting from hour to hour its minutely changing fortunes. Yes! that was the reason why visible, audible, sensible things glowed so brightly, why there was such luxury in sounds, words, rhythms, of the new light come on the world, of that wonderful freshness. With a masterly appliance of what was near and familiar, or again in the way of bold innovation, he found new words for perennially new things, and the novel accent awakened long-slumbering associations. Never before had words, single words, meant so much. What expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to music, to singing, the written lines! He sang of the lark, and it was the lark's voluble self. The physical beauty of humanity lent itself to every object, animate or inanimate, to the very hours and lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome fulness of expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the personal ornaments, of the people on the highway. Even Jacques Bonhomme at his labour, or idling for an hour, borrowed from his love, homely as it was, a touch of dignity or grace, and some secret of utterance, which made [57] one think of Italy or Greece. The voice of the shepherd calling, the chatter of the shepherdess turning her spindle, seemed to answer, or wait for answer,—to be fragments of love's ideal and eternal communing.

It was the power of "modernity," as renewed in every successive age for genial youth, protesting, defiant of all sanction in these matters, that the true "classic" must be of the present, the force and patience of present time. He had felt after the thing, and here it was,—the one irresistible poetry there had ever been, with the magic word spoken in due time, transforming his own age and the world about him, presenting its everyday touch, the very trick one knew it by, as an additional grace, asserting the latent poetic rights of the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent. Poetry need no longer mask itself in the habit of a bygone day: Gaston could but pity the people of bygone days for not being above-ground to read. Here, was a discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed in turn to one and to another, to be propagated for the imaginative regeneration of the world. It was a manner, a habit of thought, which would invade ordinary life, and mould that to its intention. In truth, all the world was already aware, and delighted. The "school" was soon to pay the penalty of that immediate acceptance, that intimate fitness to the mind of its own time, by sudden [58] and profound neglect, as a thing preternaturally tarnished and tame, like magic youth, or magic beauty, turned in a moment by magic's own last word into withered age. But then, to the liveliest spirits of that time it had seemed nothing less than "impeccable," after the manner of the great sacred products of the past, though in a living tongue. Nay! to Gaston for one, the power of the old classic poetry itself was explained by the reflex action of the new, and might seem to justify its pretensions at last.

From the poem fancy wandered to the poet, and curious youth would fain see the writer in person,—what a poet was like, with anxious surmises, this way and that, as to the degree in which the precious mental particles might be expected to have wrought up the outward presence to their own high quality. A creature of the eye, in this case at least, the intellectual hold on him being what it was, Gaston had no fear of disillusion. His poetic readings had borrowed an additional relish from the genial, companionable, manner of his life at this time, taking him into the remotest corners of the vast level land, and its outer ring of blue up-lands; amid which, as he rode one day with "the three," towards perfectly new prospects, he had chanced on some tangible rumour of the great poet's present abode. The hill they had mounted at leisure, in talk with a village priest, dropped suddenly upon a vague tract of wood and pasture, [59] with a dark ridge beyond towards the south-west; and the black notch, which broke its outline against the mellow space of evening light, was the steeple of the priory of Croix-val, of which reverend body Pierre de Ronsard, although a layman, was, by special favour of King Charles, Superior.

Though a formal peace was come, though the primary movers of war had taken hands or kissed each other, and were exchanging suspicious courtesies, yet the unquiet temper of war was still abroad everywhere, with an after-crop of miserable incidents. The captainless national and mercenary soldiers were become in large number thieves or beggars, and the peasant's hand sank back to the tame labour of the plough reluctantly. Relieved a little by the sentimental humour of the hour, lending, as Ronsard prompted, a poetic and always amorous interest to everything around him, poor Gaston's very human soul was vexed nevertheless at the spectacle of the increased hardness of human life, with certain misgivings from time to time at the contrast of his own luxurious tranquillity. The homeless woman suckling her babe at the roadside, the grey-beard hasting before the storm, the tattered fortune-teller who, when he shook his head at her proposal to "read his hand," assured him (perhaps with some insight into his character) "You do that"—you shake your head, negatively—"too much!" these, and the like, [60] might count as fitting human accidents in an impassioned landscape picture. And his new imaginative culture had taught him to value "surprises" in nature itself; the quaint, exciting charm of the mistletoe in the wood, of the blossom before the leaf, the cry of passing birds at night. Nay! the most familiar details of nature, its daily routine of light and darkness, beset him now with a kind of troubled and troubling eloquence. The rain, the first streak of dawn, the very sullenness of the sky, had a power, only to be described by saying that they seemed to be moral facts.

On his way at last to gaze on the abode of the new hero or demi-god of poetry, Gaston perceives increasingly, as another excellence of his verse, how truthful, how close it is to the minute fact of the scene around; as there are pleasant wines which, expressing the peculiar quality of their native soil, lose their special pleasantness away from home. The physiognomy of the scene was changed; the plain of La Beauce had ruffled itself into low green hills and gently winding valleys, with clear, quick water, and fanciful patches of heath and wood-land. Here and there a secular oak tree maintained a solitude around it. It was the district of the "little river Loir"—the Vendomois; and here, in its own country, the new poetry, notwithstanding its classic elegance, might seem a native wild flower, modest enough.

[61] He came riding with his companions towards evening along the road which had suddenly abandoned its day-long straightness for wanton curves and ascents; and there, as an owl on the wing cried softly, beyond the tops of the spreading poplars was the west front, silver-grey, and quiet, inexpressibly quiet, with its worn, late- gothic "flamings" from top to bottom, as full of reverie to Gaston's thinking as the enchanted castle in a story-book. The village lay thinly scattered around the wide, grass-grown space; below was the high espaliered garden-wall, and within it, visible through the open doors, a gaunt figure, hook-nosed, like a wizard, at work with the spade, too busily to turn and look. Or was it that he did not hear at all the question repeated thrice:—Could one see His Reverence the Prior, at least in his convent church? "You see him" was the answer, as a face, all nerve, distressed nerve, turned upon them not unkindly, the vanity of the great man aware and pleasantly tickled. The unexpected incident had quickened a prematurely aged pulse, and in reward for their good service the young travellers were bidden carry their equipment, not to the village inn, but to the guest- chamber of the half-empty priory. The eminent man of letters, who had been always an enthusiastic gardener, though busy just now not with choice flowers but with salutary kitchen-stuff, working indeed with much effort, to counteract the gout, was ready enough [62] in his solitude to make the most of chance visitors, especially youthful ones. A bell clanged; he laid aside the spade, and casting an eye at the whirling weather-vanes announced that it would snow. There had been no "sunset." They had travelled away imperceptibly from genial afternoon into a world of ashen evening.

The enemies of the lay Prior, satirists literary and religious, falsely made a priest of him, a priest who should have sacrificed a goat to pagan Bacchus. And in truth the poet, for a time a soldier, and all his life a zealous courtier, had always been capable, as a poet should be, of long-sustained meditation, adapting himself easily enough to the habits of the "religious," following attentively the choir-services in their church, of which he was a generous benefactor, and to which he presently proceeded for vespers. Gaston and "the three" sat among the Brethren, tempting curious eyes, in the stalls of the half-lighted choir, while in purple cope and jaunty biretta the lay Prior "assisted," his confidentiaire, or priestly substitute, officiating at the altar. The long, sad, Lenten office over, an invitation to supper followed, for Ronsard still loved, in his fitful retirements at one or another of his numerous benefices, to give way to the chance recreation of flattering company, and these gay lads' enthusiasm for his person was obvious. And as for himself, the great poet, with his [63] bodily graces and airs of court, had always possessed the gift of pleasing those who encountered him.

The snow was falling now in big, slow flakes, a great fire blazing under the chimney with its cipher and enigmatic motto, as they sat down to the leek-soup, the hard eggs, and the salad grown and gathered by their host's own hands. The long stone passages through which they passed from church, with the narrow brown doors of the monks' dormitories one after another along the white-washed wall, made the coquetries of the Prior's own distant apartment all the more reassuring. You remembered that from his ninth year he had been the pet of princesses, the favourite of kings. Upon the cabinets, chests, book-cases, around, were ranged the souvenirs received from various royal persons, including three kings of France, the fair Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of England; and the conversation fell to, and was kept going by, the precious contents of the place where they were sitting, the books printed and bound as they had never been before—books which meant assiduous study, the theory of poetry with Ronsard always accompanying its practice—delicate things of art, which beauty had handled or might handle, the pictured faces on the walls, in their frames of reeded ebony or jewelled filigree. There was the Minerva, decreed him at a conference of the elegant, pedantic "Jeux Floraux," which had proclaimed [64] Pierre de Ronsard "Prince of Poets." The massive silver image Ronsard had promptly offered to his patron King Charles; but in vain, for, though so greatly in want of ready-money that he melted down church ornaments and exacted "black" contributions from the clergy, one of the things in which Charles had ever been sincere was a reverence for literature.

So there it stood, doing duty for Our Lady, with gothic crown and a fresh sprig of consecrated box, bringing the odd, enigmatic physiognomy, preferred by the art of that day, within the sphere of religious devotion. The King's manuscript, declining, in verse really as good as Ronsard's, the honour not meant for him, might be read, attached to the pedestal. The ladies of his own verse, Marie, Cassandre, and the rest, idols one after another of a somewhat artificial and for the most part unrequited love, from the Angevine maiden—La petite pucelle Angevine—who had vexed his young soul by her inability to yield him more than a faint Platonic affection, down to Helen, to whom he had been content to propose no other, gazed, more impassibly than ever, from the walls.

They might have been sisters, those many successive loves, or one and the same lady over and over again, in slightly varied humour and attire perhaps, at the different intervals of some rather lengthy, mimetic masque of love, to which the theatrical dress of that day was appropriate; [65] for the mannered Italian, or Italianised, artists, including the much-prized, native Janet, with his favourite water- green backgrounds, aware of the poet's predilection, had given to all alike the same brown eyes and tender eyelids and golden hair and somewhat ambered paleness, varying only the curious artifices of the dress—knots, and nets, and golden spider-work, and clear, flat stones. Dangerous guests in that simple, cloistral place, Sibyls of the Renaissance on a mission from Italy to France, to Gaston one and all seemed under the burden of some weighty message concerning a world unknown to him; the stealthy lines of cheek and brow contriving to express it, while the lips and eyes only smiled, not quite honestly. It had been a learned love, with undissembled "hatred of the vulgar." Three royal Margarets, much-praised pearls of three succeeding generations (for to the curious in these objects purity is far from being the only measure of value) asserted charms a thought more frank, or French, though still gracefully pedantic, with their quaintly kerchiefed books—books of what?—in their pale hands. Among the ladies, on the pictured wall as in life, were the poet's male companions, stirring memories of a more material sort, though their common interest had been poetry—memories of that "Bohemia," which even a prince of court poets had frequented when he was young, of his cruder youthful vanities. [66] In some cases the date of death was inscribed below.

One there was among them, the youngest, of whose genial fame to come this experienced judge of men and books, two years before "St. Bartholomew's," was confident—a crowned boy, King Charles himself. Here perhaps was the single entirely disinterested sentiment of the poet's life, wholly independent of a long list of benefits, or benefices; for the younger had turned winsomely, appealingly, to the elder, who, forty years of age, feeling chilly at the thought, had no son. And of one only of those companions did the memory bring a passing cloud. It was long ago, on a journey, that he had first spoken, accidentally, with Joachim du Bellay, whose friendship had been the great intellectual fortune of his life. For a moment one saw the encounter at the wayside inn, in the broad, gay morning, a quarter of a century since; and there was the face—deceased at thirty-five. Pensive, plaintive, refined by sickness, of exceeding delicacy, it must from the first have been best suited to the greyness of an hour like this. To-morrow, where will be the snow?

The leader in that great poetic battle of the Pleiad, their host himself (he explained the famous device, and named the seven chief stars in the constellation) was depicted appropriately, in veritable armour, with antique Roman cuirass of minutely inlaid gold, and flowered mantle; [67] the crisp, ceremonial, laurel-wreath of the Roman conqueror lying on the audacious, over-developed brows, above the great hooked nose of practical enterprise. In spite of his pretension to the Epicurean conquest of a kingly indifference of mind, the portrait of twenty years ago betrayed, not less than the living face with its roving, astonished eyes, the haggard soul of a haggard generation, whose eagerly-sought refinements had been after all little more than a theatrical make-believe—an age of wild people, of insane impulse, of homicidal mania. The sweet-souled songster had no more than others attained real calm in it. Even in youth nervous distress had been the chief facial characteristic. Triumphant, nevertheless, in his battle for Greek beauty—for the naturalisation of Greek beauty in the brown cloud-lands of the North- -he might have been thinking, contemptuously, of barking little Saint-Gelais, or of Monsieur Marot's pack-thread poems. He, for his part, had always held that poetry should be woven of delicate silk, or of fine linen, or at least of good home-spun worsted.

To Gaston, yielding himself to its influence, for a moment the scene around seemed unreal: an exotic, embalming air, escaped from some old Greek or Roman pleasure-place, had turned the poet's workroom into a strange kind of private sanctuary, amid these rude conventual buildings, with the March wind aloud in the chimneys. [68] Notwithstanding, what with the long day's ride, the keen evening, they had done justice to the monastic fare, the "little" wine of the country, the cream, the onions,—fine Camille, and dainty Jasmin, and the poet turned to talk upon gardening, concerning which he could tell them a thing or two—of early salads, and those special apples the king loved to receive from him, mille-fleurs pippins, painted with a thousand tiny streaks of red, yellow, and green. A dish of them came to table now, with a bottle, at the right moment, from the darkest corner of the cellar. And then, in nasal voice, well-trained to Latin intonation, giving a quite medieval amplitude to the poet's sonorities of rhythm and vocabulary, the Sub-prior was bidden to sing, after the notation of Goudimel, the "Elegy of the Rose"; the author girding cheerily at the clerkly man's assumed ignorance of such compositions.

It was but a half-gaiety, in truth, that awoke in the poet even now, with the singing and the good wine, as the notes echoed windily along the passages. On his forty-sixth year the unaffected melancholy of his later life was already gathering. The dead!—he was coming to be on their side. The fact came home to Gaston that this evocator of "the eternally youthful" was visibly old before his time; his work being done, or centered now for the most part on amendments, not invariably happy, of his earlier [69] verse. The little panelled drawers were full of them. The poet pulled out one, and as it stood open for a moment there lay the first book of the Franciade, in silken cover, white and gold, ready for the king's hands, but never to be finished.

Gaston, as he turned from that stolen reading of the opening verse in jerky, feverish, gouty manuscript, to the writer, let out his soul perhaps; for the poet's face struck fire too, and seeming to detect on a sudden the legible document of something by no means conventional below the young man's well-controlled manner and expression, he became as if paternally anxious for his intellectual furtherance, and in particular for the addition of "manly power" to a "grace" of mind, obviously there already in due sufficiency. Would he presently carry a letter with recommendation of himself to Monsieur Michel de Montaigne? Linked they were, in the common friendship of the late Etienne de la Boetie yonder! Monsieur Michel could tell him much of the great ones—of the Greek and Latin masters of style. Let his study be in them! With what justice, by the way, had those Latin poets dealt with winter, and wintry charms, in their bland Italy! And just then, at the striking of a rickety great bell of the Middle Age, in the hands of a cowled brother came the emblazoned grace-cup, with which the Prior de Ronsard had enriched his "house," and the guests withdrew.

[70] "Yesterday's snow" was nowhere, a surprising sunlight everywhere; through which, after gratefully bidding adieu to the great poet, almost on their knees for a blessing, our adventurers returned home. Gaston, intently pondering as he lingered behind the others, was aware that this new poetry, which seemed to have transformed his whole nature into half-sensuous imagination, was the product not of one or more individual writers, but (it might be in the way of a response to their challenge) a general direction of men's minds, a delightful "fashion" of the time. He almost anticipated our modern idea, or platitude, of the Zeit-geist. A social instinct was involved in the matter, and loyalty to an intellectual movement. As its leader had himself been the first to suggest, the actual authorship belonged not so much to a star as to a constellation, like that hazy Pleiad he had pointed out in the sky, or like the swarm of larks abroad this morning over the corn, led by a common instinct, a large element in which was sympathetic trust in the instinct of others. Here, truly, was a doctrine to propagate, a secret open to every one who would learn, towards a new management of life,—nay! a new religion, or at least a new worship, maintaining and visibly setting forth a single overpowering apprehension.

The worship of physical beauty a religion, the proper faculty of which would be the bodily eye! Looked at in this way, some of the well- [71] marked characteristics of the poetry of the Pleiad assumed a hieratic, almost an ecclesiastical air. That rigid correctness; that gracious unction, as of the medieval Latin psalmody; that aspiring fervour; that jealousy of the profane "vulgar"; the sense, flattering to one who was in the secret, that this thing, even in its utmost triumph, could never be really popular:—why were these so welcome to him but from the continuity of early mental habit? He might renew the over-grown tonsure, and wait, devoutly, rapturously, in this goodly sanctuary of earth and sky about him, for the manifestation, at the moment of his own worthiness, of flawless humanity, in some undreamed-of depth and perfection of the loveliness of bodily form.

And therewith came the consciousness, no longer of mere bad- neighbourship between what was old and new in his life, but of incompatibility between two rival claimants upon him, of two ideals. Might that new religion be a religion not altogether of goodness, a profane religion, in spite of its poetic fervours? There were "flowers of evil," among the rest. It came in part, avowedly, as a kind of consecration of evil, and seemed to give it the beauty of holiness. Rather, good and evil were distinctions inapplicable in proportion as these new interests made themselves felt. For a moment, amid casuistical questions as to one's indefeasible right to liberty of heart, he saw himself, somewhat [72] wearily, very far gone from the choice, the consecration, of his boyhood. If he could but be rid of that altogether! Or if that would but speak with irresistible decision and effect! Was there perhaps somewhere, in some penetrative mind in this age of novelties, some scheme of truth, some science about men and things, which might harmonise for him his earlier and later preference, "the sacred and the profane loves," or, failing that, establish, to his pacification, the exclusive supremacy of the latter?

IV. PEACH-BLOSSOM AND WINE

[73] Those searchings of mind brought from time to time cruel starts from sleep, a sudden shudder at any wide outlook over life and its issues, draughts of mental east-wind across the hot mornings, into which the voices of his companions called him, to lose again in long rambles every thought save that of his own firm, abounding youth. These rambles were but the last, sweet, wastefully-spent remnants of a happy season. The letter for Monsieur Michel de Montaigne was to hand, with preparations for the distant journey which must presently break up their comradeship. Nevertheless, its actual termination overtook them at the last as if by surprise: on a sudden that careless interval of time was over.

The carelessness of "the three" at all events had been entire. Secure, on the low, warm, level surface of things, they talked, they, rode, they ate and drank, with no misgivings, mental or moral, no too curious questions as to the essential nature of their so palpable well-being, [74] or the rival standards thereof, of origins and issues. And yet, with all their gaiety, as its last triumphant note in truth, they were ready to trifle with death, welcoming, by way of a foil to the easy character of their days, a certain luxurious sense of danger—the night-alarm, the arquebuse peeping from some quiet farm-building across their way, the rumoured presence in their neighbourhood of this or that great military leader—delightful premonitions of the adventurous life soon to be their own in Paris. What surmises they had of any vaguer sort of danger, took effect, in that age of wizardry, as a quaintly practical superstition, the expectation of cadaverous "churchyard things" and the like, intruding themselves where they should not be, to be dissipated in turn by counter-devices of the dark craft which had evoked them. Gaston, then, as in after years, though he saw no ghosts, could not bear to trifle with such matters: to his companions it was a delight, as they supped, to note the indication of nameless terrors, if it were only in the starts and crackings of the timbers of the old place. To the turbid spirits of that generation the midnight heaven itself was by no means a restful companion; and many were the hours wasted by those young astrophiles in puzzling out the threats, or the enigmatic promises, of a starry sky.

The fact that armed persons were still abroad, thieves or assassins, lurking under many disguises, [75] might explain what happened on the last evening of their time together, when they sat late at the open windows as the night increased, serene but covered summer night, aromatic, velvet-footed. What coolness it had was pleasant after the wine; and they strolled out, fantastically muffled in certain old heraldic dresses of parade, caught up in the hall as they passed through, Gaston alone remaining to attend on his grandfather. In about an hour's time they returned, not a little disconcerted, to tell a story of which Gaston was reminded (seeing them again in thought as if only half real, amid the bloomy night, with blood upon their boyish flowers) as they crossed his path afterwards at three intervals. Listening for the night-hawk, pushing aside the hedge-row to catch the evening breath of the honeysuckle, they had sauntered on, scarcely looking in advance, along the causeway. Soft sounds came out of the distance, but footsteps on the hard road they had not heard, when three others fronted them face to face—Jasmin, Amadée, and Camille—their very selves, visible in the light of the lantern carried by Camille: they might have felt the breath upon their cheeks: real, close, definite, cap for cap, plume for plume, flower for flower, a light like their own flashed up counter-wise, but with blood, all three of them, fresh upon the bosom, or in the mouth. It was well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even devils, [76] as wise men know, taking flight at its white glitter through the air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with mimic counter-motion, upon nothing—upon the empty darkness before them.

Curdled at heart for an hour by that strange encounter, they went on their way next morning no different. There was something in the mere belief that peace was come at last. For a moment Huguenots were, or pretended to be, satisfied with a large concession of liberty; to be almost light of soul. The French, who can always pause in the very midst of civil bloodshed to eulogise the reign of universal kindness, were determined to treat a mere armistice as nothing less than realised Utopia. To bear offensive weapons became a crime; and the sense of security at home was attested by vague schemes of glory to be won abroad, under the leadership of "The Admiral," the great Huguenot Coligni, anxious to atone for his share in the unhappiness of France by helping her to foreign conquests. Philip of Spain had been watching for the moment when Charles and Catherine should call the Duke of Alva into France to continue his devout work there. Instead, the poetic mind of Charles was dazzled for a moment by the dream of wrestling the misused Netherlands from Spanish rule altogether.

Under such genial conditions, then, Gaston set out towards those south-west regions he had [77] always yearned to, as popular imagination just now set thither also, in a vision of French ships going forth from the mouths of the Loire and the Gironde, from Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle, to the Indies, in rivalry of Spanish adventure. The spasmodic gaiety of the time blent with that of the season of the year, of his own privileged time of life, and allowed the opulent country through which he was to pass all its advantages. Ever afterwards that low ring of blue hills beyond La Beauce meant more for him, not less, than of old. After the reign of his native apple-blossom and corn, it was that of peach-blossom and wine. Southwards to Orleans and the Loire then, with the course of the sunny river, to Blois, to Amboise, to Tours, he traversed a region of unquestioned natural charm, heightened greatly by the mental atmosphere through which it reached him. Black Angers, white Saumur, with its double in the calm broad water below, the melancholy seigneurial woods of Blois, ranged themselves in his memory as so many distinct types of what was dignified or pleasant in human habitations. Frequently, along the great historic stream, as along some vast street, contemporary genius was visible (a little prematurely as time would show) in a novel and seductive architecture, which, by its engrafting of exotic grace on homely native forms, spoke of a certain restless aspiration to be what one was not but might become—the old [78] Gaulish desire to be refined, to be mentally enfranchised by the sprightlier genius of Italy. With their terraced gardens, their airy galleries, their triumphal chimney-pieces, their spacious stairways, their conscious provision for the elegant enjoyment of all seasons in turn, here surely were the new abodes for the new humanity of this new, poetic, picturesque age. What but flawless bodies, duly appointed to typically developed souls, could move on the daily business of life through these dreamy apartments into which he entered from time to time, finding their very garniture like a personal presence in them? Was there light here in the earth itself? It was a landscape, certainly, which did not merely accept the sun, but flashed it back gratefully from the white, gracious, carven houses, that were like a natural part of it. As he passed below, fancy would sometimes credit the outlook from their lofty gables with felicities of combination beyond possibility. What prospects of mountain and sea-shore from those aerial window- seats!

And still, as in some sumptuous tapestry, the architecture, the landscape, were but a setting for the human figures: these palatial abodes, never out of sight, high on the river bank, challenged continual speculation as to their inhabitants—how they moved, read poetry and romance, or wrote the memoirs which were like romance, passed through all the hourly changes of their all- [79] accomplished, intimate life. The Loire was the river pre-eminently of the monarchy, of the court; and the fleeting human interests, fact or fancy, which gave its utmost value to the liveliness of the natural scene, found a centre in the movements of Catherine and her sons, still roving, after the eccentric habit inherited from Francis the First, from one "house of pleasure" to another, in the pursuit at once of amusement and of that political intrigue which was the serious business of their lives. Like some fantastic company of strolling players amid the hushed excitement of a little town, the royal family, with all its own small rivalries, would be housed for the night under the same roof with some of its greater enemies—Henri de Guise, Condé, "The Admiral," all alike taken by surprise—but courteously, and therefore ineffectively. And Gaston, come thus by chance so close to them, had the sense not so much of nearness to the springs of great events, as of the likeness of the whole matter to a stage-play with its ingeniously contrived encounters, or the assortments of a game of chance.

And in a while the dominant course of the river itself, the animation of its steady, downward flow, even amid the sand-shoals and whispering islets of the dry season, bore his thoughts beyond it, in a sudden irresistible appetite for the sea; and he determined, varying slightly from the prescribed route, to reach his destination by way [80] of the coast. From Nantes he descended imperceptibly along tall hedge-rows of acacia, till on a sudden, with a novel freshness in the air, through a low archway of laden fruit-trees it was visible—sand, sea, and sky, in three quiet spaces, line upon line. The features of the landscape changed again, and the gardens, the rich orchards, gave way to bare, grassy undulations: only, the open sandy spaces presented their own native flora, for the fine silex seemed to have crept into the tall, wiry stalks of the ixias, like grasses the seeds of which had expanded, by solar magic, into veritable flowers, crimson, green, or yellow patched with black.

It was pleasant to sleep as if in the sea's arms, amid the low murmurs, the salt odour mingled with the wild garden scents of a little inn or farm, forlorn in the wide enclosure of an ancient manor, deserted as the sea encroached—long ago, for the fig-trees in the riven walls were tough and old. Next morning he must turn his back betimes, with the freshness of the outlook still undimmed, all colours turning to white on the shell-beach, the wrecks, the children at play on it, the boat with its gay streamers dancing in the foam. Bright as the scene of his journey had been, it had had from time to time its grisly touches; a forbidden fortress with its steel-clad inmates thrust itself upon the way; the village church had been ruined too recently to count as picturesque; and at last, at the meeting-point of [81] five long causeways across a wide expanse of marshland, where the wholesome sea turned stagnant, La Rochelle itself scowled through the heavy air, the dark ramparts still rising higher around its dark townsfolk:—La Rochelle, the "Bastion of the Gospel" according to John Calvin, the conceded capital of the Huguenots. They were there, and would not leave it, even to share the festivities of the marriage of King Charles to his little Austrian Elizabeth about this time—the armed chiefs of Protestantism, dreaming of a "dictator" after the Roman manner, who should set up a religious republic. Serried closely together on land, they had a strange mixed following on the sea. Lair of heretics, or shelter of martyrs, La Rochelle was ready to protect the outlaw. The corsair, of course, would be a Protestant, actually armed perhaps by sour old Jeanne of Navarre—the ship he fell across, of course, Spanish. A real Spanish ship of war, gay, magnificent, was gliding even then, stealthily, through the distant haze; and nearer lay what there was of a French navy. Did the enigmatic "Admiral," the coming dictator, Coligni, really wish to turn it to foreign adventure, in rivalry of Spain, as the proper patriotic outcome of this period, or breathing-space, of peace and national unity?

Undoubtedly they were still there, even in this halcyon weather, those causes of disquiet, like the volcanic forces beneath the massive [82] chestnut-woods, spread so calmly through the breathless air, on the ledges and levels of the red heights of the Limousin, under which Gaston now passed on his way southwards. On his right hand a broad, lightly diversified expanse of vineyard, of towns and towers innumerable, rolled its burden of fat things down the slope of the Gironde towards the more perfect level beyond. In the heady afternoon an indescribable softness laid hold on him, from the objects, the atmosphere, the lazy business, of the scene around. And was that the quarter whence the dry daylight, the intellectual iron, the chalybeate influence, was to come?—those coquettish, well-kept, vine-wreathed towers, smiling over a little irregular old village, itself half-hidden in gadding vine, pointed out by the gardeners (all labourers here were gardeners) as the end of his long, pleasant journey, as the abode of Monsieur Michel de Montaigne, the singular but not unpopular gentleman living there among his books, of whom Gaston hears so much over-night at the inn where he rests, before delivering the great poet's letter, entering his room at last in a flutter of curiosity.

In those earlier days of the Renaissance, a whole generation had been exactly in the position in which Gaston now found himself. An older ideal moral and religious, certain theories of man and nature actually in possession, still haunted humanity, at the very moment when it was [83] called, through a full knowledge of the past, to enjoy the present with an unrestricted expansion of its own capacities.—Might one enjoy? Might one eat of all the trees?—Some had already eaten, and needed, retrospectively, a theoretic justification, a sanction of their actual liberties, in some new reading of human nature itself and its relation to the world around it.—Explain to us the propriety, on the full view of things, of this bold course we have taken, or know we shall take!

Ex post facto, at all events, that justification was furnished by the Essays of Montaigne. The spirit of the essays doubtless had been felt already in many a mind, as, by a universal law of reaction, the intellect does supply the due theoretic equivalent to an inevitable course of conduct. But it was Montaigne certainly who turned that emancipating ethic into current coin. To Pascal, looking back upon the sixteenth century as a whole, Montaigne was to figure as the impersonation of its intellectual licence; while Shakespeare, who represents the free spirit of the Renaissance moulding the drama, hints, by his well-known preoccupation with Montaigne's writings, that just there was the philosophic counterpart to the fulness and impartiality of his own artistic reception of the experience of life.

Those essays, as happens with epoch-marking books, were themselves a life, the power which [84] makes them what they are having been accumulated in them imperceptibly by a thousand repeated modifications, like character in a person: at the moment when Gaston presented himself, to go along with the great "egotist" for a season, that life had just begun. Born here, at the place whose name he took, Montaigne—the acclivity—of Saint Michael, just thirty-six years before, brought up simply, earthily, at nurse in one of the neighbouring villages, to him it was doubled strength to return thither, when, disgusted with the legal business which had filled his days hitherto, seeing that "France had more laws than all the rest of the world," and was what one saw, he began the true work of his life, a continual journey in thought, "a continual observation of new and unknown things," his bodily self remaining, for the most part, with seeming indolence at home.

It was Montaigne's boast that throughout those invasive times his house had lain open to all comers, that his frankness had been rewarded by immunity from all outrages of war, of the crime war shelters: and openness—that all was wide open, searched through by light and warmth and air from the soil—was the impression it made on Gaston, as he passed from farmyard to garden, from garden to court, to hall, up the wide winding stair, to the uppermost chamber of the great round tower; in which sun-baked place the studious man still lingered over a late [85] breakfast, telling, like all around, of a certain homely epicureanism, a rare mixture of luxury with a preference for the luxuries that after all were home-grown and savoured of his native earth.

Sociable, of sociable intellect, and still inclining instinctively, as became his fresh and agreeable person, from the midway of life, towards its youthful side, he was ever on the alert for a likely interlocutor to take part in the conversation, which (pleasantest, truly! of all modes of human commerce) was also of ulterior service as stimulating that endless inward converse from which the essays were a kind of abstract. For him, as for Plato, for Socrates whom he cites so often, the essential dialogue was that of the mind with itself; but this dialogue throve best with, often actually needed, outward stimulus—physical motion, some text shot from a book, the queries and objections of a living voice.—"My thoughts sleep, if I sit still." Neither "thoughts," nor "dialogues," exclusively, but thoughts still partly implicate in the dialogues which had evoked them, and therefore not without many seemingly arbitrary transitions, many links of connexion to be supposed by the reader, constituting their characteristic difficulty, the Essays owed their actual publication at last to none of the usual literary motives—desire for fame, to instruct, to amuse, to sell—but to the sociable desire for a still wider range of conversation with others. [86] He wrote for companionship, "if but one sincere man would make his acquaintance"; speaking on paper, as he "did to the first person he met."—"If there be any person, any knot of good company, in France or elsewhere, who can like my humour, and whose humours I can like, let them but whistle, and I will run!"

Notes of expressive facts, of words also worthy of note (for he was a lover of style), collected in the first instance for the help of an irregular memory, were becoming, in the quaintly labelled drawers, with labels of wise old maxim or device, the primary, rude stuff, or "protoplasm," of his intended work, and already gave token of its scope and variety. "All motion discovers us"; if to others, so also to ourselves. Movement, rapid movement of some kind, a ride, the hasty survey of a shelf of books, best of all a conversation like this morning's with a visitor for the first time,—amid the felicitous chances of that, at some random turn by the way, he would become aware of shaping purpose: the beam of light or heat would strike down, to illuminate, to fuse and organise the coldly accumulated matter, of reason, of experience. Surely, some providence over thought and speech led one finely through those haphazard journeys! But thus dependent to so great a degree on external converse for the best fruit of his own thought, he was also an efficient evocator of the thought of another—himself an original spirit more than tolerating [87] the originality of others,—which brought it into play. Here was one who (through natural predilection, reinforced by theory) would welcome one's very self, undistressed by, while fully observant of, its difference from his own—one's errors, vanities, perhaps fatuities. Naturally eloquent, expressive, with a mind like a rich collection of the choice things of all times and countries, he was at his best, his happiest, amid the magnetic contacts of an easy conversation. When Gaston years afterwards came to read the famous Essays, he found many a delightful actual conversation re-set, and had the key we lack to their surprises, their capricious turns and lapses.—Well! Montaigne had opened the letter, had forthwith passed his genial criticism on the writer, and then, characteristically, forgetting all about it, turned to the bearer as if he had been intimate with him from childhood. And the feeling was mutual. Gaston in half an hour seemed to have known his entertainer all his life.

In unimpeded talk with sincere persons of what quality soever—there, rather than in shadowy converse with even the best books—the flower, the fruit, of mind was still in life-giving contact with its root. With books, as indeed with persons, his intercourse was apt to be desultory. Books!—He was by way of asserting his independence of them, was their very candid friend:—they were far from being [88] an unmixed good. He would observe (the fact was its own scornful comment) that there were more books upon books than upon any other subject. Yet books, more than a thousand volumes, a handsome library for that day, nicely representative not only of literature but of the owner's taste therein, lay all around; and turning now to this, now to that, he handled their pages with nothing less than tenderness: it was the first of many inconsistencies which yet had about them a singularly taking air, of reason, of equity. Plutarch and Seneca were soon in the foreground: they would "still be at his elbow to test and be tested": masters of the autumnal wisdom that was coming to be his own, ripe and placid—from the autumn of old Rome, of life, of the world, the very genius of second thoughts, of exquisite tact and discretion, of judgment upon knowledge.

But the books dropped from his hands in the very midst of enthusiastic quotation; and the guest was mounting a little turret staircase, was on the leaden roof of the old tower, amid the fat, noonday Gascon scenery. He saw, in bird's-eye view, the country he was soon to become closely acquainted with, a country (like its people) of passion and capacity, though at that moment emphatically lazy. Towards the end of life some conscientious pangs seem to have touched Montaigne's singularly humane and sensitive spirit, when he looked back on the [89] long intellectual entertainment he had had, in following, as an inactive spectator, "the ruin of his country," through a series of chapters, every one of which had told emphatically in his own immediate neighbourhood. With its old and new battlefields, its business, its fierce changes, and the old perennial sameness of men's ways beneath them all, it had been certainly matter of more assiduous reading than even those choice, incommensurable, books, of ancient Greek and Roman experience. The variableness, the complexity, the miraculous surprises of man, concurrent with the variety, the complexity, the surprises of nature, making all true knowledge of either wholly relative and provisional; a like insecurity in one's self, if one turned thither for some ray of clear and certain evidence; this, with an equally strong sense all the time of the interest, the power and charm, alike of man and nature and of the individual mind;—such was the sense of this open book, of all books and things. That was what this quietly enthusiastic reader was ready to assert as the sum of his studies; disturbingly, as Gaston found, reflecting on his long unsuspicious sojourn there, and detaching from the habits, the random traits of character, his concessions and hints and sudden emphatic statements, the soul and potency of the man.

How imperceptibly had darkness crept over them, effacing everything but the interior of [90] the great circular chamber, its book-shelves and enigmatic mottoes and the tapestry on the wall,—Circe and her sorceries, in many parts—to draw over the windows in winter. Supper over, the young wife entered at last. Always on the lookout for the sincerities of human nature (sincerity counting for life-giving form, whatever the matter might be) as he delighted in watching children, Montaigne loved also to watch grown people when they were most like children; at their games, therefore, and in the mechanical and customary parts of their existence, as discovering the real soul in them. Abstaining from the dice himself, since for him such "play was not play enough, but too grave and serious a diversion," and remarking that "the play of children is not performed in play, but to be judged as their most serious action," he set Gaston and the amiable, unpedantic, lady to play together, where he might observe them closely; the game turning still, irresistibly, to conversation, the last and sweetest if somewhat drowsy relics of this long day's recreations.—Was Circe's castle here? If Circe could turn men into swine, could she also release them again? It was frailty, certainly, that Gaston remained here week after week, scarce knowing why; the conversation begun that morning lasting for nine months, over books, meals, in free rambles chiefly on horseback, as if in the waking intervals of a long day-sleep.

V. SUSPENDED JUDGMENT

[91] The diversity, the undulancy, of human nature!—so deep a sense of it went with Montaigne always that himself too seemed to be ever changing colour sympathetically therewith. Those innumerable differences, mental and physical, of which men had always been aware, on which they had so largely fed their vanity, were ultimate. That the surface of humanity presented an infinite variety was the tritest of facts. Pursue that variety below the surface!—the lines did but part further and further asunder, with an ever-increasing divergency, which made any common measure of truth impossible. Diversity of custom!—What was it but diversity in the moral and mental view, diversity of opinion? and diversity of opinion, what but radical diversity of mental constitution? How various in kind and degree had he found men's thoughts concerning death, for instance, "some (ah me!) even running headlong upon it, with [92] a real affection"? Death, life; wealth, poverty; the whole sum of contrasts; nay! duty itself,—the relish of right and wrong"; all depend upon the opinion each one has of them, and "receive no colour of good or evil but according to the application of the individual soul." Did Hamlet learn of him that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"?—What we call evil is not so of itself: it depends only upon us, to give it another taste and complexion.—Things, in respect of themselves, have peradventure their weight, measure, and conditions; but when once we have taken them into us, the soul forms them as she pleases.—Death is terrible to Cicero, courted by Cato, indifferent to Socrates.—Fortune, circumstance, offers but the matter: 'tis the soul adds the form.—Every opinion, how fantastic soever to some, is to another of force enough to be espoused at the risk of life."

For opinion was the projection of individual will, of a native original predilection. Opinions!—they are like the clothes we wear, which warm us, not with their heat, but with ours. Track your way (as he had learned to do) to the remote origin of what looks like folly; at home, on its native soil, it was found to be justifiable, as a proper growth of wisdom. In the vast conflict of taste, preference, conviction, there was no real inconsistency. It was but that the soul looked "upon things with [93] another eye, and represented them to itself with another kind of face; reason being a tincture almost equally infused into all our manners and opinions; though there never were in the world two opinions exactly alike." And the practical comment was, not as one might have expected, towards the determination of some common standard of truth amid that infinite variety, but to this effect rather, that we are not bound to receive every opinion we are not able to refute, nor to accept another's refutation of our own; these diversities being themselves ultimate, and the priceless pearl of truth lying, if anywhere, not in large theoretic apprehension of the general, but in minute vision of the particular; in the perception of the concrete phenomenon, at this particular moment, and from this unique point of view—that for you, this for me—now, but perhaps not then.

Now; and not then! For if men are so diverse, not less disparate are the many men who keep discordant company within each one of us, "every man carrying in him the entire form of human condition." "That we taste nothing pure:" the variancy of the individual in regard to himself: the complexity of soul which there, too, makes "all judgments in the gross" impossible or useless, certainly inequitable, he delighted to note. Men's minds were like the grotesques which some artists of that day loved to joint together, or like one of his own [94] inconstant essays, never true for a page to its proposed subject. "Nothing is so supple as our understanding: it is double and diverse; and the matters are double and diverse, too."

Here, as it seemed to Gaston, was one for whom exceptions had taken the place of law: the very genius of qualification followed him through all his keen, constant, changeful consideration of men and things. How many curious moral variations he had to show!—"vices that are lawful": vices in us which "help to make up the seam in our piecing, as poisons are useful for the conservation of health": "actions good and excusable that are not lawful in themselves": "the soul discharging her passions upon false objects where the true are wanting": men doing more than they propose, or they hardly know what, at immense hazard, or pushed to do well by vice itself, or working for their enemies: "condemnations more criminal than the crimes they condemn": the excuses that are self-accusations: instances, from his own experience, of a hasty confidence in other men's virtue which "God had favoured": and how, "even to the worst people, it is sweet, their end once gained by a vicious act, to foist into it some show of justice." In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion!—Yes! Gaston felt them, the oldest of [95] them, moving, as he listened, under and away from his feet, as if with the ground he stood on. And this was the vein of thought which oftenest led the master back contemptuously to emphasise the littleness of man.—"I think we can never be despised according to our full desert."

By way of counterpoise, there were admirable surprises in man. That cross-play of human tendencies determined from time to time in the forces of unique and irresistible character, "moving all together," pushing the world around it to phenomenal good or evil. For such as "make it their business to oversee human actions, it seems impossible they should proceed from one and the same person." Consolidation of qualities supposed, this did but make character, already the most attractive, because the most dynamic, phenomenon of experience, more interesting still. So tranquil a spectator of so average a world, a too critical minimiser, it might seem, of all that pretends to be of importance, Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his contact, in life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with forces full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the torrents:—overpowering desire augmented, yet victorious, by its very difficulty; the bewildering constancy of martyrs; single-hearted virtue not to be resolved into anything less surprising than itself; the devotion of that famed, so companionable, wife, dying cheerfully [96] by her own act along with the sick husband "who could do no better than kill himself"; the grief, the joy, of which men suddenly die; the unconscious Stoicism of the poor; that stern self-control with which Jacques Bonhomme goes as usual to his daily labour with a heart tragic for the dead child at home; nay! even the boldness and strength of "those citizens who sacrifice honour and conscience, as others of old sacrificed their lives, for the good of their country." So carefully equable, his mind nevertheless was stored with, and delighted in, incidents, personalities, of barbarous strength—Esau, in all his phases—the very rudest children or "our great and powerful mother, nature." As Plato had said, "'twas to no purpose for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy," or, if truth were spoken, of any other high matter of doing or making. That was consistent with his sympathetic belief in the capability of mere impetuous youth as such. Even those unexpected traits in ordinary people which seem to hint at larger laws and deeper forces of character, disconcerting any narrow judgment upon them, he welcomed as akin to his own indolent, but suddenly kindling, nature:—the mere self-will of men, the shrewd wisdom of an unlettered old woman, the fount of goodness in a cold or malicious heart. "I hear every day fools say things far from foolish." Those invincible prepossessions of humanity, or of the [97] individual, which Bacon reckoned "idols of the cave," are no offence to him; are direct informations, it may be, beyond price, from a kindly spirit of truth in things.

For him there had been two grand surprises, two pre-eminent manifestations of the power and charm of man, not to be explained away,—one, within the compass of general and public observation: the other, a matter of special intimacy to himself. There had been the greatness of the old Greek and Roman life, so greatly recorded: there had been the wisdom and kindness of Etienne de la Boetie, as made known in all their fulness to him alone. That his ardent devotion to the ancients had been rewarded with minute knowledge concerning them, was the privilege of the age in which he was born, late in the Revival of Letters. But the classical reading, which with others was often but an affectation, seducing them from the highest to a lower degree of reality, from men and women to their mere shadows in old books, had been for him nothing less than personal contact. "The qualities and fortunes" of the old Romans, especially, their wonderful straight ways through the world, the straight passage of their armies upon them, the splendour of their armour, of their entire external presence and show, their "riches and embellishments," above all, "the suddenness of Augustus," in that grander age for which decision was justifiable because really [98] possible, had ever been "more in his head than the fortunes of his own country." If "we have no hold even on things present but by imagination," as he loved to observe,—then, how much more potent, steadier, larger, the imaginative substance of the world of Alexander and Socrates, of Virgil and Caesar, than that of an age, which seemed to him, living in the midst of it, respectable mainly by its docility, by an imitation of the ancients which after all left untouched the real sources of their greatness. They had been indeed great, at the least dramatically, redeemed in part by magnificent courage and tact, in their very sins. "Our force is no more able to reach them in their vicious than in their virtuous qualities; for both the one and the other proceed from a vigour of soul which was without comparison greater in them than in us."

And yet, thinking of his friendship with the "incomparable Etienne de la Boetie, so perfect, inviolate and entire, that the like is hardly to be found in story," he had to confess that the sources of greatness must still be quick in the world. That had remained with him as his one fixed standard of value in the estimate of men and things. On this single point, antiquity itself had been surpassed; the discourses it had left upon friendship seeming to him "poor and flat in comparison of the sense he had of it." For once, his sleepless habit of analysis had been checked by the inexplicable, the absolute; [99] amid his jealously guarded indifference of soul he had been summoned to yield, and had yielded, to the magnetic power of another. "We were halves throughout, so that methinks by outliving him I defraud him of his part. I was so grown to be always his double in all things that methinks I am no more than half of myself. There is no action or thought of mine wherein I do not miss him, as I know that he would have missed me." Tender yet heroic, impulsive yet so wise, he might have done what the survivor (so it seemed to himself) was but vainly trying to do. It was worth his while to become famous, if that hapless memory might but be embalmed in one's fame. It had been better than love,—that friendship! to the building of which so much "concurrence" had been requisite, that "'twas much if fortune brought the like to pass once in three ages." Actually, we may think, the "sweet society" of those four years, in comparison with which the rest of his so pleasant life "was but smoke," had touched Montaigne's nature with refinements it might otherwise have lacked. He would have wished "to speak concerning it, to those who had experience" of what he said, could such have been found. In despair of that, he loved to discourse of it to all comers,—how it had come about, the circumstances of its sudden and wonderful growth. Yet after all were he pressed to say why he had so loved Etienne de la Boetie, he [100] could but answer, "Because it was He! Because it was I!"

And the surprises there are in man, his complexity, his variancy, were symptomatic of the changefulness, the confusion, the surprises, of the earth under one's feet, of the whole material world. The irregular, the unforeseen, the inconsecutive, miracle, accident, he noted lovingly: it had a philosophic import. It was habit rather than knowledge of them that took away the strangeness of the things actually about one. How many unlikely matters there were, testified by persons worthy of faith, "which, if we cannot persuade ourselves to believe, we ought at least to leave in suspense.—Though all that had arrived by report of past time should be true, it would be less than nothing in comparison of what is unknown."

On all sides we are beset by the incalculable—walled up suddenly, as if by malign trickery, in the open field, or pushed forward senselessly, by the crowd around us, to good-fortune. In art, as in poetry, there are the "transports" which lift the artist out of, as they are not of, himself; for orators also, "those extraordinary motions which sometimes carry them above their design." Himself, "in the necessity and heat of combat," had sometimes made answers, that went "through and through," beyond hope. The work, by its own force and fortune, sometimes outstrips the workman. And then, in [101] defiance of the proprieties, whereas poets sometimes "flag, and languish in a prosaic manner," prose will shine with the lustre, vigour and boldness, with "the fury" of poetry.

And as to "affairs,"—how spasmodic the mixture, collision or coincidence, of the mechanic succession of things with men's volition! Mere rumour, so large a factor in events,—who could trace out its ways? Various events (he was never tired of illustrating the fact) "followed from the same counsel." Fortune, chance, that is to say, the incalculable contribution of mere matter to man, "would still be mistress of events"; and one might think it no un-wisdom to commit everything to fortuity. But no! "fortune too is oft-times observed to act by the rule of reason: chance itself comes round to hold of justice;" war, above all, being a matter in which fortune was inexplicable, though men might seem to have made it the main business of their lives. If "the force of all counsel lies in the occasion," that is because things perpetually shift. If man—his taste, his very conscience—change with the habit of time and place, that is because habit is the emphatic determination, the tyranny, of changing external and material circumstance. So it comes about that every one gives the name of barbarism to what is not in use round about him, excepting perhaps the Greeks and Romans, somewhat conventionally; and Montaigne was fond of assuring people, [102] suddenly, that could we have those privileged Greeks and Romans actually to sit beside us for a while, they would be found to offend our niceties at a hundred points. We have great power of taking ourselves in, and "pay ourselves with words." Words too, language itself, and therewith the more intimate physiognomy of thought, "slip every day through our fingers." With his eye on his own labour, wistfully, he thought on the instability of the French language in particular—a matter, after all, so much less "perennial than brass." In no respect was nature more stable, more consecutive, than man.

In nature, indeed, as in one's self, there might be no ultimate inconsequence: only, "the soul looks upon things with another eye, and represents them to itself with another kind of face: for everything has many faces and several aspects. There is nothing single and rare in respect of itself, but only in respect of our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation whereon to ground our rules, and one that represents to us a very false image of things." Ah! even in so "dear" a matter as bodily health, immunity from physical pain, what doubts! what variations of experience, of learned opinion! Already, in six years of married life, of four children treated so carefully, never, for instance, roughly awaked from sleep, "wherein," he would observe, "children are much more profoundly involved than we,"—of four children, [103] two were dead, and one even now miserably sick. Seeing the doctor depart one morning a little hastily, on the payment of his fee, he was tempted to some nice questions as to the money's worth. "There are so many maladies, and so many circumstances, presented to the physician, that human sense must soon be at the end of its lesson:—the many complexions in a melancholy person; the many seasons in winter; the many nations in the French; the many ages in age; the many celestial mutations in the conjunction of Venus and Saturn; the many parts in man's body, nay, in a finger. And suppose the cure effected, how can we assure ourselves that it was not because the disease was arrived at its period, or an effect of chance, or the operation of something else that the child had eaten, drunk, or touched that day, or by virtue of his mother's prayers? We suppose we see one side of a thing when we are really looking at another. As for me, I never see all of anything; neither do they who so largely promise to show it to others. Of the hundred faces that everything has I take one, and am for the most part attracted by some new light I find in it."

And that new light was sure to lead him back very soon to his "governing method, ignorance"—an ignorance "strong and generous, and that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an ignorance, which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive [104] knowledge itself"—a sapient, instructed, shrewdly ascertained ignorance, suspended judgment, doubt everywhere.—Balances, very delicate balances; he was partial to that image of equilibrium, or preponderance, in things. But was there, after all, so much as preponderance anywhere? To Gaston there was a kind of fascination, an actually aesthetic beauty, in the spectacle of that keen-edged intelligence, dividing evidence so finely, like some exquisite steel instrument with impeccable sufficiency, always leaving the last word loyally to the central intellectual faculty, in an entire disinterestedness. If on the one hand he was always distrustful of things that he wished, on the other he had many opinions he would endeavour to make his son dislike, if he had one. What if the truest opinions were not always the most commodious to man, "being of so wild a composition"? He would say nothing to one party that he might not on occasion say to the other, "with a little alteration of accent." Yes! Doubt, everywhere! doubt in the far background, as the proper intellectual equivalent to the infinite possibilities of things: doubt, shrewdly economising the opportunities of the present hour, in the very spirit of the traveller who walks only for the walk's sake,—"every day concludes my expectation, and the journey of my life is carried on after the same fashion": doubt, finally, as "the best of pillows to sleep on." And in fact Gaston did sleep well after [105] those long days of physical and intellectual movement, in that quiet world, till the spring came round again.

But beyond and above all the various interests upon which the philosopher's mind was for ever afloat, there was one subject always in prominence—himself. His minute peculiarities, mental and physical, what was constitutional with him as well as his transient humours, how things affected him, what they really were to him, Michael, much more than man, all this Gaston came to know, as the world knew it afterwards in the Essays, often amused, sometimes irritated, but never suspicious of postures, or insincerity. Montaigne himself admitted his egotism with frank humour:—"in favour of the Huguenots, who condemn our private confession, I confess myself in public." And this outward egotism of manner was but the symptom of a certain deeper doctrinal egotism:—"I have no other end in writing but to discover myself." And what was the purport, what the justification, of this undissembled egotism? It was the recognition, over against, or in continuation of, that world of floating doubt, of the individual mind, as for each one severally, at once the unique organ, and the only matter, of knowledge,—the wonderful energy, the reality and authority of that, in its absolute loneliness, conforming all things to its law, without witnesses as without judge, without appeal, save to itself. [106] Whatever truth there might be, must come for each one from within, not from without. To that wonderful microcosm of the individual soul, of which, for each one, all other worlds are but elements,—to himself,—to what was apparent immediately to him, what was "properly of his own having and substance": he confidently dismissed the inquirer. His own egotism was but the pattern of the true intellectual life of every one. "The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own. If the world find fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves." How it had been "lodged in its author":—that, surely, was the essential question, concerning every opinion that comes to one man from another.

Yet, again, even on this ultimate ground of judgment, what undulancy, complexity, surprises!—"I have no other end in writing but to discover myself, who also shall peradventure be another thing to- morrow." The great work of his life, the Essays, he placed "now high, now low, with great doubt and inconstancy." "What are we but sedition? like this poor France, faction against faction, within ourselves, every piece playing every moment its own game, with as much difference between us and ourselves as between ourselves and others. Whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom will hardly find himself twice in the same condition. [107] I give to myself sometimes one face and sometimes another, according to the side I turn to. I have nothing to say of myself, entirely and without qualification. One grows familiar with all strange things by time. But the more I frequent myself and the better I know myself, the less do I understand myself. If others would consider themselves as I do, they would find themselves full of caprice. Rid myself of it I cannot without making myself away. They who are not aware of it have the better bargain. And yet I know not whether they have or no!"

One's own experience!—that, at least, was one's own: low and earthy, it might be; still, the earth was, emphatically, good, good-natured; and he loved, emphatically, to recommend the wisdom, amid all doubts, of keeping close to it. Gaston soon knew well a certain threadbare garment worn by Montaigne in all their rides together, sitting quaintly on his otherwise gallant appointments,—an old mantle that had belonged to his father. Retained, as he tells us, in spite of its inconvenience, "because it seemed to envelope me in him," it was the symbol of a hundred natural, perhaps somewhat material, pieties. Parentage, kinship, relationship through earth,—the touch of that was everywhere like a caress to him. His fine taste notwithstanding, he loved, in those long rambles, to partake of homely fare, paying largely for it. Everywhere it was as if the earth in him turned kindly to [108] earth. "Under the sun," the sturdy purple thistles, the blossoming burrs also, were worth knowing. Let us grow together with you! they seem to say. Himself was one of those whom he thought "Heaven favoured" in making them die, so naturally, by degrees. "I shall be blind before I am sensible of the decay of my sight, with such kindly artifice do the Fatal Sisters entwist our lives. I melt, and steal away from myself. How variously is it no longer I!" It was not he who would carry a furry robe at midsummer, because he might need it in the winter.—"In fine, we must live among the living, and let the river flow under the bridge without our care, above all things avoiding fear, that great disturber of reason. The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear."

And still, health, the invincible survival of youth, "admonished him to a better wisdom than years and sickness." Was there anything better, fairer, than the beautiful light of health? To be in health was itself the sign, perhaps the essence, of wisdom—a wisdom, rich in counsels regarding all one's contacts with the earthy side of existence. And how he could laugh!—at that King of Thrace, for instance, who had a religion and a god all to himself, which his subjects might not presume to worship; at that King of Mexico, who swore at his coronation not only to keep the laws, but also to make the sun run his annual course; at those followers [109] of Alexander, who all carried their heads on one side as Alexander did. The natural second-best, the intermediate and unheroic virtue (even the Church, as we know, by no means requiring "heroic" virtue), was perhaps actually the best, better than any kind of heroism, in an age whose very virtues were apt to become insane; an age "guilty and extravagant" in its very justice; for which, as regards all that belongs to the spirit, the one thing needful was moderation. And it was characteristic of Montaigne, a note of the real helpfulness there was in his thoughts, that he preferred to base virtue on low, safe, ground. "The lowest walk is the safest: 'tis the seat of constancy." The wind about the tower, coming who knows whence and whither?—could one enjoy its music, unless one knew the foundations safe, twenty feet below-ground? Always he loved to hear such words as "soften and modify the temerity of our propositions." To say less than the truth about it, to dissemble the absoluteness of its claim, was agreeable to his confidence in the natural charm, the gaiety, of goodness, "that fair and beaten path nature has traced for us," over against any difficult, militant, or chimerical virtue.—"Never had any morose and ill-looking physician done anything to purpose." In that age, it was a great thing to be just blameless. Virtue had its bounds, "which once transgressed, the next step was into the territories [110] of vice." "All decent and honest means of securing ourselves from harm, were not only permitted but commendable." Any man who despises his own life, might "always be master of that of another." He would not condemn "a magistrate who sleeps; provided the people under his charge sleep as well as he." Though a blundering world, in collusion with a prejudiced philosophy, has "a great suspicion of facility," there was a certain easy taking of things which made life the richer for others as well as for one's self, and was at least an excellent makeshift for disinterested service to them. With all his admiration for the antique greatness of character, he would never commend "so savage a virtue, and one that costs so dear," as that, for instance, of the Greek mother, the Roman father, who assisted to put their own erring sons to death. More truly commendable was the custom of the Lacedaemonians, who when they went to battle sacrificed always to the Muses, that "these might, by their sweetness and gaiety, soften martial fury." How had divine philosophy herself been discredited by the sour mask, the sordid patches, with which, her enemies surely! had sent her abroad into the world. "I love a gay and civil philosophy. There is nothing more cheerful than wisdom: I had like to have said more wanton."

Was that why his conversation was sometimes coarse? "All the contraries are to be found in [111] me, in one corner or another"; if delicacy, so also coarseness. Delicacy there was, certainly,—a wonderful fineness of sensation. "To the end," he tells us, "that sleep should not so stupidly escape from me, I have caused myself to be disturbed in my sleep, so that I might the better and more sensibly taste and relish it.—Of scents, the simple and natural seem to me the most pleasing, and I have often observed that they cause an alteration in me, and work upon my spirits according to their several virtues. In excessive heats I always travel by night, from sunset to sunrise. I am betimes sensible of the little breezes that begin to sing and whistle in the shrouds, the forerunners of the storm.—When I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are for a while taken up with foreign occurrences, I some part of the time call them back again to my walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of the solitude, and to myself.—There is nothing in us either purely corporeal, or purely spiritual. 'Tis an inhuman wisdom that would have us despise and hate the culture of the body. 'Tis not a soul, 'tis not a body, we are training up, but a man; and we ought not to divide him. Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to despise our being."

There was a fineness of sensation in these unpremeditated thoughts, which to Gaston seemed to connect itself with the exquisite words he had found to paint his two great affections, for his [112] father and for Etienne de la Boetie,—a fineness of sensation perhaps quite novel in that age, but still of physical sensation: and in pursuit of fine physical sensation he came, on his broad, easy, indifferent passage through the world, across the coarsest growths which also thrive "under the sun," and was not revolted. They were akin to that ruder earth within himself, of which a kind of undissembled greed was symptomatic; the love of "meats little roasted, very high, and even, as to several, quite gone"; while, in drinking, he loved "clear glass, that the eye might taste too, according to its capacity"; akin also to a certain slothfulness:—"Sleeping," he says, "has taken up a great part of my life." And there was almost nothing he would not say: no fact, no story, from his curious half-medical reading, he would not find some plausible pretext to tell. Man's kinship to the animal, the material, and all the proofs of it:—he would never blush at them! In truth, he led the way to the immodesty of French literature; and had his defence, a sort of defence, ready. "I know very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their own thoughts."

Yet when Gaston, twenty years afterwards, heard of the seemingly pious end of Monsieur de Montaigne, he recalled a hundred, always quiet but not always insignificant, acts of devotion, noticeable in those old days, on passing a village [113] church, or at home, in the little chapel—superstitions, concessions to others, strictly appropriate recognitions rather, as it might seem, of a certain great possibility, which might lie among the conditions of so complex a world. That was a point which could hardly escape so reflective a mind as Gaston's: and at a later period of his life, at the harvest of his own second thoughts, as he pondered on the influence over him of that two-sided thinker, the opinion that things as we find them would bear a certain old-fashioned construction, seemed to have been the consistent motive, however secret and subtle in its working, of Montaigne's sustained intellectual activity. A lowly philosophy of ignorance would not be likely to disallow or discredit whatever intimations there might be, in the experience of the wise or of the simple, in favour of a venerable religion, which from its long history had come to seem like a growth of nature. Somewhere, among men's seemingly random and so inexplicable apprehensions, might lie the grains of a wisdom more precious than gold, or even its priceless pearl. That "free and roving thing," the human soul—what might it not have found out for itself, in a world so wide? To deny, at all events, would be only "to limit the mind, by negation."

It was not however this side of that double philosophy which recommended itself just now to Gaston. The master's wistful tolerance, so [114] extraordinary a characteristic in that age, attracted him, in his present humour, not so much in connexion with those problematic heavenly lights that might find their way to one from infinite skies, as with the pleasant, quite finite, objects and experiences of the indubitable world of sense, so close around him. Over against the world's challenge to make trial of it, here was that general licence, which his own warm and curious appetite just then demanded of the moral theorist. For so pronounced a lover of sincerity as Monsieur de Montaigne, there was certainly a strange ambiguousness in the result of his lengthy inquiries, on the greatest as well as on the lightest matters, and it was inevitable that a listener should accept the dubious lesson in his own sense. Was this shrewd casuist only bringing him by a roundabout way to principles he would not have cared to avow? To the great religious thinker of the next century, to Pascal, Montaigne was to figure as emphatically on the wrong side, not merely because "he that is not with us, is against us." It was something to have been, in the matter of religious tolerance, as on many other matters of justice and gentleness, the solitary conscience of the age. But could one really care for truth, who never even seemed to find it? Did he fear, perhaps, the practical responsibility of getting to the very bottom of certain questions? That the actual discourse of so keen a thinker appeared often inconsistent or inconsecutive, might be a [115] hint perhaps that there was some deeper ground of thought in reserve; as if he were really moving, securely, over ground you did not see. What might that ground be? As to Gaston himself,—had this kindly entertainer only been drawing the screws of a very complex piece of machinery which had worked well enough hitherto for all practical purposes?—Was this all that had been going on, while he lingered there, week after week, in a kind of devout attendance on theories, and, for his part, feeling no reverberation of actual events around him, still less of great events in preparation? These were the questions Gaston had in mind, as, at length, he thanked his host one morning with real regret, and took his last look around that meditative place, the manuscripts, the books, the emblems,—the house of Circe on the wall.

VI. SHADOWS OF EVENTS

[116] We all feel, I suppose, the pathos of that mythic situation in Homer, where the Greeks at the last throb of battle around the body of Patroclus find the horror of supernatural darkness added to their other foes; feel it through some touch of truth to our own experience how the malignancy of the forces against us may be doubled by their uncertainty and the resultant confusion of one's own mind—blindfold night there too, at the moment when daylight and self-possession are indispensable.

In that old dream-land of the Iliad such darkness is the work of a propitiable deity, and withdrawn at its pleasure; in life, it often persists obstinately. It was so with the agents on the terrible Eve of St. Bartholomew, 1572, when a man's foes were those of his own household. An ambiguity of motive and influence, a confusion of spirit amounting, as we approach the centre of action, to physical madness, encompasses [117] those who are formally responsible for things; and the mist around that great crime, or great "accident," in which the gala weather of Gaston's coming to Paris broke up, leaving a sullenness behind it to remain for a generation, has never been penetrated. The doubt with which Charles the Ninth would seem to have left the world, doubt as to his own complicity therein, as well as to the precise nature, the course and scope, of the event itself, is still unresolved. So it was with Gaston also. The incident in his life which opened for him the profoundest sources of regret and pity, shaped as it was in a measure by those greater historic movements, owed its tragic significance there to an unfriendly shadow precluding knowledge how certain facts had really gone, a shadow which veiled from others a particular act of his and the true character of its motives.

For, the scene of events being now contracted very closely to Paris, the predestined actors therein were gradually drawn thither as into some narrow battlefield or slaughter-house or fell trap of destiny, and Gaston, all unconsciously, along with them—he and his private fortunes involved in those larger ones. Result of chance, or fate, or cunning prevision, there are in the acts great and little—the acts and the words alike—of the king and his associates, at this moment, coincidences which give them at least superficially the colour of an elaborate conspiracy. [118] Certainly, as men looked back afterwards, all the seemingly random doings of those restless months ending in the Noces Vermeilles marriage of Henry of Navarre with Margaret of France, lent themselves agreeably to the theory of a great plot to crush out at one blow, in the interest of the reigning Valois, not the Huguenots only but the rival houses of Guise and Bourbon. The word, the act, from hour to hour through what presented itself at the time as a long-continued season of frivolity, suggested in retrospect alike to friend and foe the close connexion of a mathematical problem. And yet that damning coincidence of date, day and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems to shut all the doors upon escaping victims, is admitted even by Huguenot historians to have been fortuitous. Gaston, recalling to mind the actual mien of Charles as be passed to and fro across the chimeric scene, timid, and therefore constitutionally trustful towards older persons, filially kissing the hand of the grim Coligni- -Mon père! Mon père!—all his câlineries in that age of courtesy and assassinations—would wonder always in time to come, as the more equitable sort of historians have done, what amount of guilty foresight the young king had carried in his bosom. And this ambiguity regarding the nearest agent in so great a crime, adding itself to the general mystery of life, touched Gaston duly with a sense [119] of the dim melancholy of man's position in the world. It might seem the function of some cruel or merely whimsical power, thus, by the flinging of mere dust through the air, to double our actual misfortunes. However carefully the critical intelligence in him might trim the balance, his imagination at all events would never be clear of the more plausible construction of events. In spite of efforts not to misjudge, in proportion to the clearness with which he recalled the visible footsteps of the "accursed" Valois, he saw them, irresistibly, in connexion with the end actually reached, moving to the sounds of wedding music, through a world of dainty gestures, amid sonnets and flowers, and perhaps the most refined art the world has seen, to their surfeit of blood.

And if those "accursed" Valois might plead to be judged refinedly, so would Gaston, had the opportunity come, have pleaded not to be misunderstood. Of the actual event he was not a spectator, and his sudden absence from Paris at that moment seemed to some of those he left there only a cruelly characteristic incident in the great treachery. Just before that delirious night set in, the news that his old grandfather lay mortally sick at Deux-manoirs had snatched him away to watch by the dying bed, amid the peaceful ministries of the religion which was even then filling the houses of Paris with blood. But the yellow-haired woman, light of soul, whose husband he had become by dubious and [120] irregular Huguenot rites, the religious sanction of which he hardly recognised—flying after his last tender kiss, with the babe in her womb, from the ruins of her home, and the slaughter of her kinsmen, supposed herself treacherously deserted. For him, on the other hand, "the pity of it," the pity of the thing supplied all that had been wanting in its first consecration, and made the lost mistress really a wife. His recoil from that damaging theory of his conduct brought home to a sensitive conscience the fact that there had indeed been a measure of self-indulgent weakness in his acts, and made him the creature for the rest of his days of something like remorse.

The gaiety, the strange devils' gaiety of France, at least in all places whither its royalty came, ended appropriately in a marriage—a marriage of "The Reform" in the person of Prince Henry of Navarre, to Catholicism in the person of Margaret of Valois, Margaret of the "Memoirs," Charles's sister, in tacit defiance of, or indifference to, the Pope. With the great Huguenot leaders, with the princes of the house of Guise, and the Court, like one united family, all in gaudy evidence in its streets, Paris, ever with an eye for the chance of amusement, always preoccupied with the visible side of things, always Catholic—was bidden to be tolerant for a moment, to carry no fire-arms under penalties, "to renew no past [121] quarrels," and draw no sword in any new one. It was the perfect stroke of Catherine's policy, the secret of her predominance over her sons, thus, with a flight of purchaseable fair women ever at command, to maintain perpetual holiday, perpetual idleness, with consequent perpetual, most often idle, thoughts about marriage, amid which the actual conduct of affairs would be left to herself. Yet for Paris thus Catholic, there was certainly, even if the Pope were induced to consent, and the Huguenot bride-groom to "conform," something illicit and inauspicious about this marriage within the prohibited degrees of kinship. In fact, the cunningly sought papal dispensation never came; Charles, with apparent unconcern, fulfilled his threat, and did without it; must needs however trick the old Cardinal de Bourbon into performing his office, not indeed "in the face of the Church," but in the open air outside the doors of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the Catholics quietly retiring into the interior, when that starveling ceremony was over, to hear the nuptial mass. Still, the open air, the August sunshine, had lent the occasion an irresistible physical gaiety in this hymeneal Assumption weather. Paris, suppressing its scruples, its conscientious and unconscientious hatreds, at least for a season, had adorned herself as that fascinating city always has been able to adorn herself, if with something of artifice, certainly [121] with great completeness, almost to illusion. Whatever gloom the Middle Age with its sins and sorrows might have left there, was under gallant disguise to-day. In the train of the young married people, jeunes premiers in an engagement which was to turn out almost as transitory as a stage-play, a long month of masquerade meandered night and day through the public places. His carnality and hers, so startling in their later developments, showed now in fact but as the engaging force of youth, since youth, however unpromising its antecedents, can never have sinned irretrievably. Yet to curious retrospective minds not long afterwards, these graceful follies would seem tragic or allegoric, with an undercurrent of infernal irony throughout. Charles and his two brothers, keeping the gates of a mimic paradise in the court of the Louvre, while the fountains ran wine—were they already thinking of a time when they would keep those gates, with iron purpose, while the gutters ran blood?

If Huguenots were disgusted with the frivolities of the hour, passing on the other side of the street in sad attire, plotting, as some have thought, as their enemies will persuade the Pope, a yet more terrible massacre of their own, only anticipated by the superior force and shrewdness of the Catholics, on the very eve of its accomplishment— they did but serve just now to relieve the predominant white and red, [123] and thereby double the brilliancy, of a gay picture. Yet a less than Machiavellian cunning might perhaps have detected, amid all this sudden fraternity—as in some unseasonably fine weather signs of coming distress—a risky element of exaggeration in those precipitately patched-up amities, a certain hollow ring in those improbable religious conversions, those unlikely reconciliations in what was after all an age of treachery as a fine art. With Gaston, however, the merely receptive and poetic sense of life was abundantly occupied with the spectacular value of the puissant figures in motion around him. If he went beyond the brilliancy of the present moment in his wonted pitiful equitable after-thoughts, he was still concerned only with the more general aspects of the human lot, and did not reflect that every public movement, however generous in its tendency, is really flushed to active force by identification with some narrower personal or purely selfish one. Coligni, "the Admiral," centre of Huguenot opposition, just, kind, grim, to the height of inspired genius, the grandest character his faith had yet produced—undeterred by those ominous voices (of aged women and the like) which are apt to beset all great actions, yielded readily to the womanish endearments of Charles, his filial words and fond touching of the hands, the face, aged at fifty-five—just this portion of his conduct let us hope being exclusive of his precise share [124] in the "conspiracy." And the opportune death in Paris of the Huguenot Queen of Navarre only stirred question for a moment: autopsy revealed no traces of unfair play, though at a time credulous as to impossible poisoned perfumes and such things, romantic in its very suspicions.

Delirium was in the air already charged with thunder, and laid hold on Gaston too. It was as if through some unsettlement in the atmospheric medium the objects around no longer acted upon the senses with the normal result. Looking back afterwards, this singularly self-possessed person had to confess that under its influence he had lost for a while the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real differences and oppositions of things in that hotly coloured world of Paris (like a shaken tapestry about him) awaiting the Eve of Saint Bartholomew. Was the "undulant" philosophy of Monsieur de Montaigne, in collusion with this dislocating time, at work upon him, that, following with only too entire a mobility the experience of the hour, he found himself more than he could have thought possible the toy of external accident? Lodged in Abelard's quarter, he all but repeats Abelard's typical experience. His new Heloise, with capacities doubtless, as he reflected afterwards regretfully, for a refined and serious happiness, although actually so far only a man's plaything, sat daintily amid her posies and painted potteries in the [125] window of a house itself as forbidding and stern as her kinsmen, busy Huguenot printers, well-to-do at a time not only fertile in new books and new editions, but profuse of tracts, sheets, satiric handbills for posting all over France. Gaston's curiosity, a kind of fascination he finds in their dark ways, takes him among them on occasion, to feel all the more keenly the contrast of that picture- like prettiness in this framing of their grim company, their grim abode. Her frivolity is redeemed by a sensitive affection for these people who protect her, by a self-accusing respect for their religion, for the somewhat surly goodness, the hard and unattractive pieties into which she cannot really enter; and she yearns after her like, for those harmless forbidden graces towards which she has a natural aptitude, loses her heart to Gaston as he goes to and fro, wastes her days in reminiscence of that bright passage, notes the very fineness of his linen. To him, in turn, she seems, as all longing creatures ever have done, to have some claim upon him—a right to consideration—to an effort on his part: he finds a sister to encourage: she touches him, clings where she touches. The gloomy, honest, uncompromising Huguenot brothers interfere just in time to save her from the consequence of what to another than Gaston might have counted as only a passing fondness to be soon forgotten; and the marriage almost forced upon him seemed under its actual conditions no binding sacrament. [126] A marriage really indissoluble in itself, and for the heart of Colombe sacramental, as he came afterwards to understand—for his own conscience at the moment, the transaction seemed to have but the transitoriness, as also the guilt of a vagrant love. A connexion so light of motive, so inexpressive of what seemed the leading forces of his character, he might, but for the sorrow which stained its actual issue, have regarded finally as a mere mistake, or an unmeaning accident in his career.

Coligni lay suffering in the fiery August from the shot of the ambiguous assassin which had missed his heart, amid the real or feigned regrets of the Guises, of the royal family, of his true friends, wondering as they watched whether the bullet had been a poisoned one. The other Huguenot leaders had had their warnings to go home, as the princes of the house of Navarre, Condé and Henry of Bearn, would fain have done—the gallant world about them being come just now to have certain suspicious resemblances to a prison or a trap. Under order of the king the various quarters of Paris had been distributed for some unrevealed purpose of offence or defence. To the officers in immediate charge it was intimated that "those of the new religion" designed "to rise against the king's authority, to the trouble of his subjects and the city of Paris. For the prevention of which conspiracy the king enjoined the Provost to possess himself [127] of the keys of the various city gates, and seize all boats plying on the river, to the end that none might enter or depart." And just before the lists close around the doomed, Gaston has bounded away on his road homeward to the bed of the dying grandfather, after embracing his wife, anxious, if she might, to share his journey, with some forecast of coming evil among those dark people.

The white badges of Catholicism had been distributed, not to every Catholic (a large number of Catholics perished), to some Huguenots such as La Rochefoucauld, brave guerrier et joyeux compagnon, dear to Charles, hesitating still with some last word of conscience in his ear at the very gate of the Louvre, when a random pistol-shot, in the still undisturbed August night, rousing sudden fear for himself, precipitates the event, and as if in delirium he is driven forth on the scent of human blood. He had always hunted like a madman. It was thus "the matins of Paris" began, in which not religious zealots only assisted, but the thieves, the wanton, the unemployed, the reckless children, les enfants massacreurs like those seen dragging an insulted dead body to the Seine, greed or malice or the desire for swift settlement of some long-pending law-suit finding here an opportunity. A religious pretext had brought into sudden evidence all the latent ferocities of a corrupt though dainty civilisation, and while the stairways of the Louvre, the streets, [128] the vile trap-doors of Paris, run blood, far away at Deux-manoirs Gaston watches as the light creeps over the silent cornfields, the last sense of it in those aged eyes now ebbing softly away. The village priest, almost as aged, assists patiently with his immemorial consolations at this long, leisurely, scarce perceptible ending to a long, leisurely life, on the quiet double-holiday morning.*

The wild news of public disaster, penetrating along the country roads now bristling afresh with signs of universal war, seemed of little consequence in comparison with that closer grief at home, which made just then the more effective demand on his sympathy, till the thought came of the position of Colombe—his wife left behind there in Paris. Immediate rumour, like subsequent history, gave variously the number- -the number of thousands—who perished. The great Huguenot leader was dead, one party at least, the royal party, safe for the moment and in high spirits. As Charles himself put it, the ancient private quarrel between the houses of Guise and Chatillon was ended by the decease of the chief of the latter, Coligni de Châtillon—a death so saintly after its new fashion that the long-delayed vengeance of Henri de Guise on the presumed instigator of the murder of his father seemed a martyrdom. And around that central barbarity the slaughter had spread over Paris in widening [129] circles. With conflicting thoughts, in wild terror and grief, Gaston seeks the footsteps of Colombe, of her people, from their rifled and deserted house to the abodes of their various acquaintance, like the traces of wrecked men under deep water. Yet even amid his private distress, queries on points of more general interest in the event would not be excluded. With whom precisely, in whose interest had the first guilty motion been?—Gaston on the morrow asked in vain as the historian asks still. And more and more as he picked his way among the direful records of the late massacre, not the cruelty only but the obscurity, the accidental character, yet, alas! also the treachery, of the public event seemed to identify themselves tragically with his own personal action. Those queries, those surmises were blent with the enigmatic sense of his own helplessness amid the obscure forces around him, which would fain compromise the indifferent, and had made him so far an accomplice in their unfriendly action that he felt certainly not quite guiltless, thinking of his own irresponsible, self-centered, passage along the ways, through the weeks that had ended in the public crime and his own private sorrow. Pity for those unknown or half-known neighbours whose faces he must often have looked on—ces pauvres morts!—took an almost remorseful character from his grief for the delicate creature whose vain longings had been perhaps but a rudimentary aptitude for the [130] really high things himself had represented to her fancy, the refined happiness to which he might have helped her. The being whose one claim had lain in her incorrigible lightness, came to seem representative of the suffering of the whole world in its plenitude of piteous detail, in those unvalued caresses, that desire towards himself, that patient half- expressed claim not to be wholly despised, poignant now for ever. For he failed to find her: and her brothers being presumably dead, all he could discover of a certainty from the last survivor of her more distant kinsmen was the fact of her flight into the country, already in labour it was thought, and in the belief that she had been treacherously deserted, like many another at that great crisis. In the one place in the neighbourhood of Paris with which his knowledge connected her he seeks further tidings, but hears only of her passing through it, as of a passage into vague infinite space; a little onward, dimly of her death, with the most damaging view of his own conduct presented with all the condemnatory resources of Huguenot tongues, but neither of the place nor the circumstances of that event, nor whether, as seemed hardly probable, the child survived. It was not till many years afterwards that he stood by her grave, still with no softening of the cruel picture driven then as with fire into his soul; her affection, her confidence in him still contending with the suspicions, the ill-concealed [131] antipathy to him of her hostile brothers, the distress of her flight, half in dread to find the husband she was pursuing with the wildness of some lost child, who seeking its parents begins to suspect treacherous abandonment. That most mortifying view of his actions had doubtless been further enforced on her by others, the worst possible reading, to her own final discomfiture, of a not unfaithful heart.

NOTES

VII. THE LOWER PANTHEISM

     Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,
     Viel gelesen, viel gereist,
     Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen,
     Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist.—HEINE.+

[132] Those who were curious to trace the symmetries of chance or destiny felt now quite secure in observing that, of nine French kings of the name, every third Charles had been a madman. Over the exotic, nervous creature who had inherited so many delicacies of organisation, the coarse rage or rabies of the wolf, part, doubtless, of an inheritance older still, had asserted itself on that terrible night of Saint Bartholomew, at the mere sight, the scent, of blood, in the crime he had at least allowed others to commit; and it was not an unfriendly witness who recorded that, the fever once upon him, for an hour he had been less a man than a beast of prey. But, exemplifying that exquisite fineness of cruelty proper to an ideal tragedy, with the [133] work of his madness all around him, he awoke sane next day, to remain so—aged at twenty-one—seeking for the few months left him to forget himself in his old out-of-door amusements, rending a consumptive bosom with the perpetual horn-blowing which could never rouse again the gay morning of life.

"I have heard," says Brantome, of Elisabeth, Charles's queen, "that on the Eve of Saint Bartholomew, she, having no knowledge of the matter, went to rest at her accustomed hour, and, sleeping till the morning, was told, as she arose, of the brave mystery then playing. 'Alas!' she cried; 'the king! my husband! does he know it?' 'Ay! Madam,' they answered; 'the king himself has ordained it.' 'God!' she cried; 'how is this? and what counsellors be they who have given him this advice? O God, be pitiful! for unless Thou art pitiful I fear this offence will never be pardoned unto him;' and asking for her 'Hours,' suddenly betook herself to prayer, weeping."

Like the shrinking, childish Elisabeth, the Pope also wept at that dubious service to his Church from one who was, after all, a Huguenot in belief; and Huguenots themselves pitied his end.—"Ah! ces pauvres morts! que j'ai eu un meschant conseil! Ah! ma nourrice! ma mie, ma nourrice! que de sang, et que de meurtres!"

It was a peculiarity of the naturally devout [134] Gaston that, habituated to yield himself to the poetic guidance of the Catholic Church in her wonderful, year-long, dramatic version of the story of redemption, he had ever found its greatest day least evocative of proportionate sympathy. The sudden gaieties of Easter morning, the congratulations to the Divine Mother, the sharpness of the recoil from one extreme of feeling to the other, for him never cleared away the Lenten pre-occupation with Christ's death and passion: the empty tomb, with the white clothes lying, was still a tomb: there was no human warmth in the "spiritual body": the white flowers, after all, were those of a funeral, with a mortal coldness, amid the loud Alleluias, which refused to melt at the startling summons, any more than the earth will do in the March morning because we call it Spring. It was altogether different with that other festival which celebrates the Descent of the Spirit, the tongues, the nameless impulses gone all abroad, to soften slowly, to penetrate, all things, as with the winning subtlety of nature, or of human genius. The gracious Pentecostal fire seemed to be in alliance with the sweet, warm, relaxing winds of that later, securer, season, bringing their spicy burden from unseen sources. Into the close world, like a walled garden, about him, influences from remotest time and space found their way, travelling unerringly on their long journeys, as [135] if straight to him, with the assurance that things were not wholly left to themselves; yet so unobtrusively that, a little later, the transforming spiritual agency would be discernible at most in the grateful cry of an innocent child, in some good deed of a bad man, or unlooked-for gentleness of a rough one, in the occasional turning to music of a rude voice. Through the course of years during which Gaston was to remain in Paris, very close to other people's sins, interested, all but entangled, in a world of corruption in flower (pleasantly enough to the eye), those influences never failed him. At times it was as if a legion of spirits besieged his door: "Open unto me! Open unto me! My sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled!" And one result, certainly, of this constant prepossession was, that it kept him on the alert concerning theories of the divine assistance to man, and the world,—theories of inspiration. On the Feast of Pentecost, on the afternoon of the thirtieth of May, news of the death of Charles the Ninth had gone abroad promptly, with large rumours as to the manner of it. Those streams of blood blent themselves fantastically in Gaston's memory of the event with the gaudy colours of the season—the crazy red trees in blossom upon the heated sky above the old grey walls; like a fiery sunset, it might seem, as he looked back over the ashen intervening years. To Charles's successor (he and [136] the Queen-mother now delightfully secure from fears, however unreasonable, of Charles's jerking dagger) the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably by various pious and other observances, which still further fixed the thought of that Sunday on Gaston's mind, with continual surmise as to the tendencies of so complex and perplexing a scene.

The last words of Charles had asserted his satisfaction in leaving no male child to wear his crown. But the brother, whose obvious kingly qualities, the chief facts really known of him so far, Charles was thought to have envied—the gallant feats of his youth, de ses Jeunes guerres, his stature, his high-bred beauty, his eloquence, his almost pontifical refinement and grace,—had already promptly deserted the half-barbarous kingdom, his acceptance of which had been but the mask of banishment; though he delayed much on his way to the new one, passing round through the cities of Venice and Lombardy, seductive schools of the art of life as conceived by Italian epicures, of which he became only too ready a student. On Whit-Monday afternoon, while Charles "went in lead," amid very little private or public concern, to join his kinsfolk at Saint-Denys, Paris was already looking out for its new king, following, through doubtful rumour, his circuitous journey to the throne, by Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Turin, over Mont Cenis, by Lyons, to French [137] soil, still building confidently on the prestige of his early manhood. Seeing him at last, all were conscious in a moment of the inversion of their hopes. Had the old witchcrafts of Poland, the old devilries of his race, laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with a programme which looked like formal irony on the kingly position, a premeditated mockery of those who yielded him, on demand, a servile reverence never before paid to any French monarch? Well! the amusement, or business, of Parisians, at all events, would still be that of spectators, assisting at the last act of the Valois tragedy, in the course of which fantastic traits and incidents would naturally be multiplied. Fantastic humour seemed at its height in the institution of a new order of knighthood, the enigmatic splendours of which were to be a monument of Henry's superstitious care, or, as some said, of his impious contempt, of the day which had made him master of his destiny,—that great Church festival, towards the emphatic marking of which he was ever afterwards ready to welcome any novel or striking device for the spending of an hour.

It was on such an occasion, then,—on a Whitsunday afternoon, amid the gaudy red hues of the season, that Gaston listened to one, who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event then commemorated, had a great [138] deal to say concerning the Spirit; above all, of the freedom, the indifference, of its operations; and who would give a strangely altered colour, for a long time to come, to the thoughts, to the very words, associated with the celebration of Pentecost. The speaker, though understood to be a brother of the Order of Saint Dominic, had not been present at the mass—the daily University red mass, De Spiritu Sancto, but said to-day according to the proper course of the season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, with much pomp, by the Italian Bishop of Paris. It was the reign of the Italians just then, a doubly refined, somewhat morbid, somewhat ash- coloured, Italy in France, more Italian still. What our Elisabethan poets imagined about Italian culture—forcing all they knew of Italy to an ideal of dainty sin such as had never actually existed there,— that the court of Henry, so far as in it lay, realised in fact. Men of Italian birth, "to the great suspicion of simple people," swarmed in Paris, already "flightier, less constant, than the girouettes on its steeples"; and it was love for Italian fashions that had brought king and courtiers here this afternoon, with great éclat, as they said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely considered, dress of the moment, pressing the learned University itself into the background; for the promised speaker, about whom tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had [139] come from Italy. In an age in which all things about which Parisians much cared must be Italian, there might be a hearing for Italian philosophy. Courtiers at least would understand Italian; and this speaker was rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts of his native language. And of all the kingly qualities of Henry's youth, the single one which had held by him was that gift of eloquence he was able also to value in others; an inherited gift perhaps, for amid all contemporary and subsequent historic gossip about his mother, the two things certain are, that the hands credited with so much mysterious ill- doing were fine ones, and that she was an admirable speaker.

Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it, that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well-found in worldly and personal advantages, was above all conscious of great intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty, chastity, and obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of mind may really come to, in such places, what daring new departures it may suggest even to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by the dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and [140] Joachim of Flora, the reputed author of a new "Everlasting Gospel"; strange dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later dispensation of the Spirit, in which all law will have passed away; or again by a recognised tendency, in the great rival Order of Saint Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to understand the dogmatic words of faith, with a difference.

The three convents in which successively Bruno had lived, at Naples, at Città di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed freely, we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius, in which, from the first, a heady southern imagination took the lead. But it was from beyond monastic bounds that he would look for the sustenance, the fuel, of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid such artificial religious stillness the air itself becomes generous in undertones. The vain young monk (vain, of course) would feed his vanity by puzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of Dominic with his neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching them their own business, the new, higher, truer sense of the most familiar terms, of the chapters they read, the hymns they sang; above all, as it happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the reign of the Spirit, and its excellent freedom. He would soon pass beyond the utmost possible limits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond the [141] largest and freest interpretation such words would bear, to words and thoughts on an altogether different plane, of which the full scope was only to be felt in certain old pagan writers,—pagan, though approached, perhaps, at first, as having a kind of natural, preparatory, kinship with Scripture itself. The Dominicans would seem to have had well-stocked, and liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, in that age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon came to the kernel of a difficult old author, Plotinus or Plato,—to the real purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only in the books of others, Empedocles, for instance, and Pythagoras, who had been nearer the original sense of things; Parmenides, above all, that most ancient assertor of God's identity with the world. The affinities, the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of all things whatever, with one another, through the consciousness, the person, of God the Spirit, who was at every moment of infinite time, in every atom of matter, at every point of infinite space; aye! was everything, in turn: that doctrine—l'antica filosofia Italiana—was in all its vigour there, like some hardy growth out of the very heart of nature, interpreting itself to congenial minds with all the fulness of primitive utterance. A big thought! yet suggesting, perhaps, from the first, in still, small, immediately practical, voice, a freer way of taking, a possible modification [142] of, certain moral precepts. A primitive morality,—call it! congruous with those larger primitive ideas, with that larger survey, with the earlier and more liberal air.

Returning to this ancient "pantheism," after the long reign of a seemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts "the vision of all things in God" to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as of all enquiry into nature. The Spirit of God, in countless variety of forms, neither above, nor in any way without, but intimately within, all things, is really present, with equal integrity and fulness, in the sunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the wandering drop of water as it evaporates therein. The divine consciousness has the same relation to the production of things as the human intelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning them. Nay! those thoughts are themselves actually God in man: a loan to man also of His assisting Spirit, who, in truth, is the Creator of things, in and by His contemplation of them. For Him, as for man in proportion as man thinks truly, thought and being are identical, and things existent only in so far as they are known. Delighting in itself, in the sense of its own energy, this sleepless, capacious, fiery intelligence, evokes all the orders of nature, all the revolutions of history, cycle upon cycle, in ever new types. And God the Spirit, the soul of the world, being therefore really identical with the [143] soul of Bruno also, as the universe shapes itself to Bruno's reason, to his imagination, ever more and more articulately, he too becomes a sharer of the divine joy in that process of the formation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process of creation, to the evolution of things. In a certain mystic sense, which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, is the creator; himself actually a participator in the creative function. And by such a philosophy, Bruno assures us, it was his experience that the soul is greatly expanded: con questa filosofia l'anima mi s'aggrandisce: mi se magnifica l'intelletto!

For, with characteristic largeness of mind, Bruno accepted this theory in the whole range of its consequences. Its more immediate corollary was the famous axiom of "indifference," of "the coincidence of contraries." To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him. The differences of things, those distinctions, above all, which schoolmen and priests, old or new, Roman or Reformed, had invented for themselves, would be lost in the length and breadth of the philosophic survey: nothing, in itself, being really either great or small; and matter certainly, in all its various forms, not evil but divine. Dare one choose or reject this or that? If God the Spirit had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter and spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom [144] and necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be superficial rather than substantial differences. Only, were joy and sorrow also, together with another distinction, always of emphatic reality to Gaston, for instance, to be added to the list of phenomena really "coincident," or "indifferent," as some intellectual kinsmen of Bruno have claimed they should?

The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away from the election, the seeming "vocation," of his youth, yet would remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in some predominant qualities of temper. At first it was only by way of thought that he asserted his liberty—delightful, late-found, privilege!—traversing, in strictly mental journeys, that spacious circuit, as it broke away before him at every moment upon ever-new horizons. Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him cries of joy, of a kind of religious joy, as in some new "canticle of the creatures," some new hymnal, or antiphonary. "Nature" becomes for him a sacred term.—"Conform thyself to Nature! "with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces that precept, to others, to himself! Recovering, as he fancies, a certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, a sense in which Pythagoras and other "inspired" theorists of early Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a [145] sacred poem, as it had been with them. That Bruno himself, in "the enthusiasm of the idea," drew from his axiom of the "indifference of contraries" the practical consequence which is in very deed latent there, that he was ready to sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is certainly a part of its rigid logic, the austerities, the purity of his own youth, for instance, there is no proof. The service, the sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great light that has dawned for him, occupying his entire conscience with the sense of his responsibilities to it, is the sacrifice of days and nights spent in eager study, of plenary, disinterested utterance of the thoughts that arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of martyrdom. The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of prayer, oblation, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive. She, too, possesses initiatory power as truly as the divine soul of the world, to which she responds with the free gift of a light and heat that seem her own.

Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in purely physical or sensuous ardours. His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of God is in all things, was not inconsistent with, nay! might encourage, a keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character [146] however minute, for humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there too, in truth, divinity lurks. From those first fair days of early Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian Platonists, combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the analogy between the flights of intellectual enthusiasm and those of physical love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter. The Eroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated to Philip Sidney, who would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment reconsiders those earlier, physically erotic, impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal, theoretic, equivalents. Yet if it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice, or Laura, by no means proves the young man's earlier desires to have been merely Platonic; and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their force and propriety by such deflexion from their earlier purpose, their later intellectual purpose as certainly finds its opportunity thereby, in the [147] matter of borrowed fire and wings. A kind of old scholastic pedantry creeping back over the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if love himself went in now for a University degree), Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages of abstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mind attains actual "union." For, as with the purely religious mystics, "union," the mystic union of souls with one another and their Lord, nothing less than union between the contemplator and the contemplated—the reality, or the sense, or at least the name of such union—was always at hand. Whence that instinctive tendency towards union if not from the Creator of things Himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation, not less than the soul of man, longs for God, "as the hart for the water- brooks"! To unite oneself to the infinite by largeness and lucidity of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life- -this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous soul. A filosofia è necessario amore. There would be degrees of progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows, therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose intellectual ardours have superseded religion and physical love, is still a lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the sweet, heady [148] incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and air, the grotesque humours of old gothic carvers, the thick stratum of pagan sentiment beneath all this,—Santa Maria sopra Minervam!—are indelible in him. Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion, zeal, dryness, recollection, desire:—he finds a place for them all: knows them all well in their unaffected simplicity, while he seeks the secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, form and purport of each.

Whether as a light on actual life, or as a mere barren scholastic subtlety, never before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with such completeness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature, so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is. The eyes that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned now with equal liveliness on the natural world, in that region of his birth, where all the colour and force of nature are at least two- fold. Nature is not only a thought or meditation in the divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which, ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the successive forms of life, of thought, of language even. What seemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only a chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of the divine Spirit. The mystic recognition that all is indeed divine had accompanied a realisation [149] of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to know. Winged, fortified, by that central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to the detailed reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him by the way, from the divine intelligence in it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to a like intelligence in him. The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by a whole generation the Baconian "philosophy of experience": in that, those bold, flighty, pantheistic speculations become tangible matter of fact. Here was the needful book for man to read; the full revelation, the story in detail, of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging, through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of being,—the veritable history of God. And nature, together with the true pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it, was still all to learn. The delightful tangle of things!—it would be the delightful task of man's thoughts to disentangle that. Already Bruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with room, perhaps, for Darwin also. That Deity is everywhere, like all such abstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for its practical effect on the mind which admits it on the peculiar perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century, faint, consumptive, with a naturally [150] faint hold on external things, the theorem that God was in all things whatever, annihilating their differences, suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contact of all alike. But in Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of the Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for every form of experience,—a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting, for one's self or another, the great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart.

Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as "the infinitely little"; no blade of grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an atom of earth,—cell, sphere, within sphere. And the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe, was, after all, but an atom in an infinite world of starry space, then lately divined by candid intelligence, which the telescope was one day to present to bodily eyes. For if Bruno must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of the earth, the infinitely little, he could look backwards also gratefully to another daring mind which had already put that earth into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds innumerable. Yes! one might well have divined what reason now demonstrated, indicating those endless [151] spaces which a real sidereal science would gradually occupy.

That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth is of like stuff with the stars:—now the familiar knowledge of children—dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly exhilarating sense of enlargement in the intellectual, nay! the physical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity and order did not desert him in that broader survey, which made the utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in the endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new conditions. The immoveable earth, as we term it, beneath one's feet!—Why, one almost felt the movement, the respiration, of God in it. And yet how greatly even the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, in the prospect, the music! "The music of the spheres!"—he could listen to it in a perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even.—

     Veni, Creator Spiritus,
     Mentes tuorum visita,
     Imple superna gratia,
     Quae tu creasti pectora.+

Yes! The grand old Christian hymns, perhaps [152] the grandest of them all, seemed to lend themselves in the chorus, to be deepened immeasurably under this new intention. It is not always, or often, that men's abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe—infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes—that prospect from which the mind of Pascal recoiled so painfully, induced in Bruno only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such, might well be pushed aside for the "excellency" of such knowledge as this. To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a kind of sullen ingratitude;—the one sin to believe, directly or indirectly, in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, as being implicitly a denial of the indwelling spirit.—A free spirit, certainly, as of old! Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself, to the infinite relish of this "prodigal son" of Dominic. God the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, of absolute limitation. Touch! see! listen! eat freely of all the trees of the garden of Paradise, with the voice of the [153] Lord God literally everywhere!—here was the final counsel of perfection. The world was even larger than youthful appetite, youthful capacity. Let theologian and every other theorist beware how he narrowed either. "The plurality of worlds!"—How petty in comparison seemed those sins, the purging of which was men's chief motive in coming to places like this convent, whence Bruno, with vows broken, or for him obsolete, presently departed. A sonnet, expressive of the joy with which he returned to so much more than the liberty of ordinary men, does not suggest that he was driven from it. Though he must have seemed to those who surely had loved so loveable a creature there to be departing, like the "prodigal" of the Gospel, into the farthest of possible far countries, there is no proof of harsh treatment on their part, or even of an effort to detain him.

It happens most naturally of course that those who undergo the shock of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise their debt to the deserted cause:—How much of the heroism, or other high quality, of their rejection has really been the product of what they reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk; and his philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a religion; very new indeed, yet a religion. He came forth well-fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as he had been played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an [154] alarum, everywhere he seemed to be but the instrument of some subtly materialised spiritual force, like that of the old Greek prophets, that "enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so high, or like impulsive Pentecostal fire. His hunger to know, fed dreamily enough at first within the convent walls, as he wandered over space and time, an indefatigable reader of books, would be fed physically now by ear and eye, by large matter-of-fact experience, as he journeys from university to university; less as a teacher than a courtier, a citizen of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual light. The philosophic need to try all things had given reasonable justification to the stirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothing else, that whole age of the later Renaissance was invincibly young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world, ever renewing its youth, became the motive of a life as mobile, as ardent, as itself, of a continual journey, the venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever-new discoveries, of renewed conviction.

The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world:—that must involve the alliance, the congruity, of all things with one another, of the teacher's personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, of the spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of his utterance, great reinforcements of sympathy. In his own case, certainly, when Bruno confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, [155] his language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as that audience might seem from the speaker. It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, passing irritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionary finds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull wits unaware. In Bruno, that abstract theory of the perpetual motion of the world was become a visible person talking with you.

And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so he presented himself to his audience in the comely Dominican habit. The reproachful eyes were to-day for the most part kindly observant, registering every detail of that singular company, all the physiognomic effects which come, by the way, on people, and, through them, on things,—the "shadows of ideas" in men's faces—his own pleasantly expressive with them, in turn. De Umbris Idearum: it was the very title of his discourse. There was "heroic gaiety" there: only, as usual with gaiety, it made the passage of a peevish cloud seem all the chillier. Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an [156] expression of high-bred melancholy, the face was one that looked, after all, made for suffering,—already half pleading, half defiant, as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair's-breadth from its estimate of yourself.

Like nature, like nature in that opulent country of his birth which the "Nolan," as he delighted to call himself, loved so well that, born wanderer as he was, he must perforce return thither sooner or later at the risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and was hardly more fastidious in speech than the "asinine" vulgar he so deeply contemned. His rank, un-weeded eloquence, abounding in play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with here and there a shameless image,—the product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation—was akin to the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in such irregularities as manifest power. Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old pagan religion, and for the primitive Italian gods, whose names and legends haunt his speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of that age of the Renaissance. To excite, to surprise, to move men's minds, like the volcanic earth as if in travail, and, according to the Socratic fancy, [157] to bring them to the birth, was after all the proper function of the teacher, however unusual it might seem in so ancient a university. "Fantastic!"—from first to last, that was the descriptive epithet; and the very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one how characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre- eminently due to Italy. A man of books, he had yet so vivid a hold on people and things, that the traits and tricks of the audience seemed to strike from his memory all the graphic resources of his old readings. He seemed to promise some greater matter than was then actually exposed by him; to be himself enjoying the fulness of a great outlook, the vague suggestion of which did but sustain the curiosity of the listeners. And still, in hearing him speak you seemed to see that subtle spiritual fire to which he testified kindling from word to word. What Gaston then heard was, in truth, the first fervid expression of all those contending views out of which his written works would afterwards be compacted, of course with much loss of heat in the process. Satyric or hybrid growths, things due to hybris,+ insult, insolence, to what the old satyrs of fable embodied,—the volcanic South is kindly prolific of these, and Bruno abounded in mockery; though it was by way of protest. So much of a Platonist, for Plato's genial humour he had nevertheless substituted the harsh laughter of Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a [158] very courtly exterior, with mordant words, in unabashed criticism of all real or suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the "Triumphant Beast," the "installation of the ass," shining even there amid the university folk,—those intellectual bankrupts of the Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them, however gravely, a worthless "parchment and paper" currency. In truth, Aristotle, the supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending, as Bruno conceived, to determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature of things from the eyes of men. "Habit"—the last word of his practical philosophy—indolent habit! what would this mean, in the intellectual life, but just that sort of dead judgments which, because the mind, the eye, were no longer really at work in them, are most opposed to the essential quickness and freedom of the spirit?

The Shadows of Ideas: De Umbris Idearum: such, in set terms, have been the subject of Bruno's discourse, appropriately to the still only half emancipated intellect of his audience:—on approximations to truth: the divine imaginations, as seen, darkly, more bearably by weaker faculties, in words, in visible facts, in their shadows merely. According to the doctrine of "Indifference," indeed, there would be no real distinction between substance and shadow. In regard to man's feeble wit, however, varying degrees of knowledge constituted such a distinction. [159] "Ideas, and Shadows of Ideas": the phrase recurred often; and, as such mystic phrases will, fixed itself in Gaston's fancy, though not quite according to the mind of the speaker; accommodated rather to the thoughts which just then preoccupied his own. As already in his life there had been the Shadows of Events,—the indirect yet fatal influence there of deeds in which he had no part, so now, for a time, he seemed to fall under the spell, the power, of the Shadows of Ideas, of Bruno's Ideas; in other words, of those indirect suggestions, which, though no necessary part of, yet inevitably followed upon, his doctrines. What, for instance, might be the proper practical limitations of that telling theory of "the coincidence, the indifference, of opposites"?

To that true son of the Renaissance, in the light of his large, antique, pagan ideas, the difference between Rome and the Reform would figure, of course, as but an insignificant variation upon some deeper and more radical antagonism, between two tendencies of men's minds. But what about an antagonism deeper still? Between Christ and the world, say!—Christ and the flesh!—or about that so very ancient antagonism between good and evil. Was there any place really left for imperfection, moral or otherwise, in a world, wherein the minutest atom, the lightest thought, could not escape from God's presence? Who should note the crime, the sin, [160] the mistake, in the operation of that eternal spirit, which was incapable of mis- shapen births? In proportion as man raised himself to the ampler survey of the divine work around him, just in that proportion did the very notion of evil disappear. There were no weeds, no "tares," in the endless field. The truly illuminated mind, discerning spiritually, might do what it would. Even under the shadow of monastic walls, that had sometimes been the precept, which larger theories of "inspiration" had bequeathed to practice. "Of all the trees of the garden thou mayest freely eat!—If ye take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you!—And I think that I, too, have the spirit of God."

Bruno, a citizen of the world, Bruno at Paris, was careful to warn off the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond its proper speculative limits. But a kind of secrecy, an ambiguous atmosphere, encompassed, from the first, alike the speaker and the doctrine; and in that world of fluctuating and ambiguous characters, the alerter mind certainly, pondering on this novel "reign of the spirit"—what it might actually be—would hardly fail to find in Bruno's doctrines a method of turning poison into food, to live and thrive thereon; an art, to Paris, in the intellectual and moral condition of that day, hardly less opportune than had it related to physical poisons. If Bruno himself was cautious not to suggest the ethic or practical [161] equivalent to his theoretic positions, there was that in his very manner of speech, in that rank, un-weeded eloquence of his, which seemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense of fine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things. The loose sympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equable maternity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent alike, rather than to art, distinguishing, rejecting, refining. Commission and omission! sins of the former surely had the natural preference. And how would Paolo and Francesca have read this lesson? How would Henry, and Margaret of the "Memoirs," and other susceptible persons then present, read it, especially if the opposition between practical good and evil traversed diametrically another distinction, the "opposed points" of which, to Gaston for instance, could never by any possibility become "indifferent,"—the distinction, namely, between the precious and the base, aesthetically; between what was right and wrong in the matter of art?

NOTES:

132. +From Aus der Harzreise, "Bergidylle 2": "Tannenbaum, mit grünen Fingern," Stanza 10. E-text editor's translation: "Now that I have grown to maturity, / Have read and traveled much, / My whole heart expands / With my belief in the Holy Spirit."

151. +The beginning of a hymn used by the Catholic Church to commemorate solemn occasions. Dryden's translation: "Creator Spirit, by whose aid / The world's foundations first were laid, / Come visit every pious mind, Come pour Thy joys on human kind."

157. +Transliteration: hybris. Liddell and Scott definition: "wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength, passion, etc."

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