M. TEUERS IN PATMOS.
THE world does not know M. Thiers. That fact is made clear by a letter which he wrote to M. Emile de Girardin while he was President of the Republic, and which has recently been published. We had all pictured M. Thiers as a restless man of action, never satisfied except when he was the visible centre of sovereign power or of intrigue, and he certainly seemed to draw an ecstatic joy from the restless life of the Presidency. There used to be an indescribable look of satisfaction on his small, bright face, as he came into the Assembly on field.days, and pushed his way through a crowd of devotees, who paid him such homage as might have fed the vanity of a born king. His keen eyes blinked more brightly as he went up to the tribune, and pre- pared for the fray. He appeared to draw delight from the sullen hostility of the Royalist deputies,—the delight which a vigorous wrestler feels on seeing a stout enemy whom he means to throw. The carefully-prepared sarcasms, the little poisoned darts of epigrammatic malice, which he flung with easy skill at sensitive foes, the contemptuous challenges which he addressed to the whole army of Royalists, all betokened the fighter who has eagerly stripped for the work and who really likes it. Sometimes, it is true, he would heave a deep rhetorical sigh at the bitter necessity of thus spending the days of his old age in wrangling, and he would remind the nation what a sacrifice he was making for its sake ; but everybody understood that note of sorrow to be only the graceful way in which a great actor was fishing for applause. Of course, M. Thiers did not mean to be taken at his word. Had the matter admitted of any doubt, it would have been banished by the kind of fury with which he flung himself into the least as well as the greatest of his duties. He would make appointments to meet deputies and journalists at an hour in the morning when no intellectual Englishman is out of bed, lie would chat gaily with political friends at lunch, and then run at once to the Assembly, ready to let off an explosive speech. An hour after the Assembly had risen he was entertaining a dozen or two of his political friends or enemies to dinner, and talking more energetically than the youngest of the company. A reception would follow, and, turning lightly from a discourse ou the only policy that would save France, he would plunge into a dissertation on the Art of the Renaissance. Nor would he rest even when the Assembly itself took holiday. He once ran down to the sea-side after a crisis, in which he himself had been overthrown for a moment, and in which, it is said, orders were given to hold the troops in readiness to keep down any inconvenient expressions of revolutionary opinion ; but even then he was busy for half the day in studying experiments in marine gunnery, and for the other half, said the satirists, in writing a book on the immortality of the soul. Next he would rush to Paris, to develope trade by giving large but frugal receptions at the Palace of the Elys6e. Three thousand people would troop through the historic rooms in a single evening, and M. Thiers would make three thousand bows. At one hour he would find himself shut in by a brilliant throng of princes, nobles, marshals, generals, statesmen, and ladies of fashion, and he would vigorously return compliments, exchange retorts, and give instruction allround. Strange as the fact may seem, he bore at such times a queer like- ness to the Great Napoleon. His small figure, his pale face, and his keen eyes, as he stood in the midst of tall princes and soldiers, and as he looked up at a boyish angle every time that he spoke to his bending companions, formed a caricature of the Emperor standing among his Marshals. At another period of the evening, some elderly dowager would get hold of the President, and pin him against a door, to tell him, perhaps, how the Pere Monsabre had denounced Radicalism last Sunday in Notre Dame ; bow the eloquent Dominican bad proved that the first duty of a Christian Government was to destroy Radicalism, root and branch ; and how he bad suggested that the chief work of Radicalism—the very mark of the Beast—was seen in the destruction of the Pope's Temporal Power. M. Thiess used to seem very much bored as the words of admonition came drip, drip, dripping; but he bore the infliction bravely, and he was so far from being exhausted, that he usually went back to Versailles the same night by the last train. Cunning enemies used to in- sinuate that he was overtasking himself, and that he ought to take more rest, for the sake of France. The Orleanists were also eager to keep him out of the tribune altogether, in order, as they said, to prevent the Presidential dignity from being ruffled by the rude collisions of debate. So they invited M. Thiess to stay at home on the days of great debate, but he laughed merrily at the transparent craft ,of all attempts to make him hold his tongue, the very instrument of his power, and he assured them that he was not tirel in the least. Then they tried to prevent his tongue from producing the magically instantaneous effect which it has so often had in divisions, by decreeing not only that he should formally give notice when he intended to speak, but that the Assembly should adjourn after he had finished. Still all these devices were only like the withes of Dalils.h, and it was not until the Samson of the Republic was shorn of his locks in the form of his majority that he fell into the hands of the Philistines. But they were not able to put out his eyes, and his hair is growing again with alarming speed. Every new election is adding to its length, and if the process be not stopped again by cropping all the Repub- lican voters, it will soon bring back such strength that he will easily pull down the temple of the Philistines.
The friends as well as the enemies of M. Thiess wondered how he could pass the time when he was suddenly flung into comparative obscurity. But be is eager to make them believe that they mistook the very essence of his nature,—that he is a mystic, instead of a bustling man of the world, and that he was never more of a mystic than when he was talking, intriguing, fighting, and appearing to enjoy the stir from sunrise to sunset. He himself attests the truth of that interesting fact in the letter which he wrote to his friend, M. Emile de Grirardin, while he was the most powerful, the most public, and the most talkative man in France. He says that he is sick of politics and intrigues and squabbles. Politics have no longer any absorbing interest for an old man like him, and he does not care for power. He is a philosopher, not a party leader ; his thoughts lie in the misty speculations of the pure reason, and not in the paltry definiteness of finance ; he would gladly lay down all the pomp and the authority of the State, if he could only get back to his beloved books. A metaphysical Cincinnatus, he has come from the plough to save the Republic, but be is eager to get back again. He has a great book in hand, which is supposed to deal with the existence of a spiritual world and the immortality of the soul. He wished to be in Patmos all the time that he was supposed to be clinging to power as men do to a first ne- cessity of existence, and he was reflecting that if the Centres would unite, he would be able to finish his Apocalypse. The opportunity came sooner than he had expected, and it is supposed that he has ever since been writing his Book of the Revelation. He thinks that the supreme want of France is a philosophy built on a demonstration of the fact that man has a soul as well as a body. She is, he believes, cursed by the demon of Materialism. Her physiologists have analysed or cut away the spirit. One of them, who boasted that his scalpel had never come across a soul, was a real type of modern Frenchmen. Comte has erected materialism into a religious system, Taine has subtly interwoven it with his brilliant pictures of society and literature, and Littre has sowed it broadcast through his "Dictionary." The Materialists are poisoning France as swiftly as they did on the eve of the Revolution, when Diderot was a kind of evangelical atheist, possessed with a consuming passion for converting man to the belief that the only heaven was Paris, that the only hell was the Bastille, that the only spirit of evil was the Church. 14.I. Thiess is as anxious to stem that tide of materialism as he is to found the Republic, and he proposes to do it by means of the Academy. Believers in the immortality of the soul still muster strongly at the Palais Mazarin, because in filling up the vacant chairs the Academicians have been much more careful that a new comer should have at least a bowing acquaintance with orthodoxy than that he should write a good style. The walls of the old place have often been shaken by pitched battles over the materialism of some- writer whom the
sceptical minority wished to honour. A memorable fight was waged over M. Taiue's "History of English Literature," which
some of the literary members sought to crown with the special approbation of the Academy because it was the moat important book of the year. Bishop Dupanloup thundered against the pro- posal to recommend to the youth of France a work instinct with the spirit of materialism, and he was aided by Victor Cousin, who had never perhaps forgotten the youthful vivacity of M. Taine's attack on his own rather gaseous philosophy. The fiery bishop and the eloquent philosopher won the day, and the materialists were smitten hip and thigh. Another grand battle of the same kind was waged when M. Littre rapped at the door of the Academy, and presented his credentials in the shape of the first volumes of his magnificent "Dictionary." The Bishop of Orleans was struck with horror at the bare idea of rubbing shoulders with a man who had erected Atheism into a system, and again were the champions of the soul victorious. At last, it is true, M. Littre's "Dictionary" grew so big and powerful that it put the spiritualists to flight, and the philological heresiarch took his seat among his old foes. But one of the bitterest, Cousin, was dead, and the most formidable, Dupauloup, had brushed the very dust of the Academy from his feet, and departed from its courts for ever, so soon as be found that it was to be polluted by the presence of a man who believed that even bishops were descended from monkeys. Satirists reminded him that he had tolerated the atheism of Merimee, but he doubtless replied that Merimee was known to the world only as a story-teller, and reserved his irreligious gibes for the dinner-table and the drawing-room.
M. Thiess belongs to the sturdy band of philosophers who have been busily engaged in proving the immortality of the soul ever since the Great Revolution. His place among them is the more
strange because he is a thorough Voltairian. It is said that during official attendance at high mass, he and M. Grevy scanda- lised the devotees by not knowing what to do with the holy-water brush. M. Thiess himself, we are told, pleads that belief in the marvels of the Church was not the fashion when he was a young man, and that he is too old to learn the secret of faith. And not only is he a Voltairian, but he has one of those precise, definite, and narrow minds which rule off all possibilities at the visible horizon. We have all seen those scientific monks who do not know what a sense of mystery means, and who are so possessed with the very demon of System, that if they were to go down to the Inferno, they would instantly form a scheme for the codification of the diabolic law. M. Thiess is no doubt saved by his sturdy com- mon-sense and his immense practice in the management of men from the algebraic and logical lunacy which smites thin, hard minds ; but he is nevertheless a very prince of definite thinkers. He is famed for the exquisite lucidity of his written and spoken statements, even in a nation whose literary and oratorical atmosphere can find a symbol of clearness only in the startling distinctness of a Greek or an Italian landscape. It has been said that he would have made the philosophy of Hegel itself intelligible. Partially, his clearness comes from a magnificent power of ar- ranging his ideas, and from his command of a language which is matchless as an instrument for the expression of definite thought. But it also comes from the limited completeness of his mind. There never was a writer who had a smaller sense of that mysterious world which wraps round this little earth and all its creatures like a great ocean of mist. His thoughts do not shade away into indefiniteness, but they are absolutely clear so far as they go, and then they leave an absolute blank. We do not believe that M. Thiess ever had a doubt in his life. He is a glare of rhetorical sunlight. It may be thought that, so far, he is only a typical Frenchman ; but in reality French literature is peculiarly rich in mysticism, and even in these unspiritual days it presents some dim horizons. The writings of Lamennais are charged with an almost Hebrew perception of the- dark veil which hangs over mankind. Michelet lived in a spectral world, and peopled even his historic scenes with weird shapes ; and no living writer dyes his pages more deeply than M. Renan with the ever-shifting hues of that world which, although unseen by the eye of sense, lives before the eye of mysticism. But M. Thiess has never betrayed the faintest perception of that side of life to which these gifted men have mainly looked. What, then, has he to do in Patmos? What Apocalypse can come from a typical logician ? His Paradise will be laid out with the triin regu- larity of the gardens of Versailles. If he should find a human soul, it will be so hard that we may cut it with a penknife ; but it will be all the more interesting to see' how he will charge his Book of the Revelation with logical formulas and appeals to the Rule of Three.
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