EDGAR QUINErS REVOLUTION.*

Tins is the noblest work yet published on its great subject. It is not, nor pretends to be, a history. It is but a study upon a history, needing, to be fully appreciated, some familiarity with the history itself. Bat beside it Carlyle's French Revolution is but as a magic lantern to a great thoughtful picture. It would be vain to seek even, in Carlyle's pages for anything more vivid than M. Rainet's sketch of a day's work of the Convention (Book xv.,

ch7iii.); but it is only the highest prose-poetry, without a particle <>f stage effect. There is not a cathh-word through the whole two volumes. Whilst the English force-worshipper can dismiss September massacres with a warning to " blockheads " not to "shriek," and the fallen Girondins with the stigma of "pedants," M. Quinet stops over those to show that they were only possible thrOugh the servility of mind engendered by previous despotism, and Over the others to point out that the Girondins were "a necessary organ of the Republic," failing which it must fail. And throughout the whole work breathes the feeling which Mr. Carlyle, in his restless hunt after heroes, each iucceeding one less worthy than the last, becomes more and more incapable of comprehending, that (to use M. Quinet's own words) "Democracy has need of justice."

It is difficult to give a satisfactory idea to the reader of a work so truly individual that it stands really by itself. If we looked to its intellectual character only, Montesquieu's Grandeur et Decadence des Remains would be the nearest parallel. But there is a solemn height of purpose, a depth of personal feeling about M. Quinet, which render such a parallel wholly superficial. On the whole,—and great as are the contrasts between the style and manner of the Frenchman and those of the Roman on the one hand, or jhe_moderkItalian on the other,—it is difficult not to feel that the former's two next of kin on either side are rather Tacitus and Dante. There is in all three the same proud looking down of a great spirit over the miseries and the degeneracy of his people ; stung often to bitterness, seldom if ever stooping to grief. The French- man has the high poetical feeling of the Italian, but not his fiery hates,' his faith; or his love ; he has much of the Roman's stoical endurance, he is self-wrapped equally, almost equally forlorn of hope ; but he has of his own what the Roman would have dis- dained, what the Italian could only cling to when raised into doctrines, theories, or to use his own term, des ide'es. Put Tacitus into nineteenth-century France, give him, instead of his old hereditary feelings of Roman justice, des idees, would he have written much otherwise than this, which concludes the work ?—

" But, you will say, your ideas have not had force on their side. They have not triumphed. You are one of the vanquished. I deny it. I remain alone, it is true, but I have had this good luck, that losing all, I have seen all my presentiments realized, all my warnings confirmed, all my principles consecrated and crowned by my voluntary ruin. That is not being vanquished."

In using the word "theories," it is by no means intended that M.

Quinet is one of those, far too frequent amongst his countrymen, who set theories in the place of facts, or square facts to them. On the contrary, he stands pre-eminent among writers on the French Revolution for candour and impartiality, for reverence for historic truth. What is meant is, that whilst he rises to the truest Astvpia or contemplation, he cannot, by looking upwards, reach to a living faith. Of no contemporary Frenchman, perhaps, could it be more truly said, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." The key-note to the whole work is the declaration that the French Revolution failed because it was not religious as well as political.

Nothing can be finer than his dissection of Rousseau's famous "Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard," that root of modern French:. religious falsehood, of which M. Renan's Jesuitical

boudoir-atheism is but one of the latest fruits. He bitterly lamen:ts‘the nullity of the Protestant element in France in the hour, of political trial. He declares that science cannot replace

religion:— He ,uncloaks the spiritual tyranny of St. Sinionisin and Comtism. He bursts out as follows against the last new goddess:— " Well, they say to me, then worship Humanity. A cartons fetish, truly ! I have seen it too close. Whatl kneel before that which is on its knees before any triumphant force? Crawl before that beast crawling on its myriad feet? That is not my faith. What should I do with such a god? Take me back to the ibises and necklaced serpents of the

Nile." _

And yet neither God nor Christ is in this book, so sternly truthful, so loftily and sharplitrue in its judgments of past and present. The Being and Fatherhood of God, the incarnation of

* La Revolution. Par Edgar gainer. Park: Idbralria Iutetaationale. 18,0. 2 role.

Christ, the Eternal Sacrifice of redeeming love, the perpetual in- spiration of the Holy Spirit, are not, for Edgar Quinet, the facts upon which stands the Universe. For him "there are three or four religious ideas spread upon the earth which give birth to the whole civil world. . . . Rocked from birth to death in the cradle which is called life, man will draw from the Unknown marvels which shall never cease ; there will always he questions which science will not be able to answer. That mystery will form the inex- haustible ground of the religions of the future." This great and fearless thinker, after proving in the clearest manner the absolute need of a religion for breathing a soul into the great crises of a nation's life, has nothing after all to point to but the worship of the Unknown God.

The weakest faith could not indeed be shaken by M. Quinet's book, so genuine and impartial are his sympathies with all that is earnest and true. Although he repeatedly insists on the fault committed by the Revolution in not actively suppressing the Roman Catholic religion, it is doubtful whether even a Roman Catholic would not be strengthened in his faith by M. Quinet's profoundly true remarks on the results of the Vendean war, in which the apparent victors were really the vanquished, and not only left their opponents in possession of those religious rites for defence of which they had taken up arms, but in a few years e.ame themselves to bow once more to the Roman Catholic faith. But the most devout Christian may learn from M. Quinet's pages; indeed, it is scarcely too much to say that in future no man can expect, without read- ing them, thoroughly to understand the period of which he speaks. Yet only those who are familiar with the twofold aspect of the French mind at the present day,—fettered at home, and too often shrivelling within its fetters,—free only in exile, but through exile too often embittered almost to madness,—can appre- ciate the manly courage which has enabled M. Quinet to write a work so thoroughly independent of party prejudices and tradi- tions, so inexorably true against friends as well as foes. No man before him has been able to unite such a passionate admiration of the great deeds of the Revolutionists,—of the Convention espe- cially,—with such an unflinching condemnation of their crimes and evil tendencies, with such a searching exhibition of the evil results to which these led. No words can exaggerate the service which he has rendered to his countrymen, in showing that the work of the Terrorists was simply a renewal of that of the Auden Re:ginze itself, the adoption of "its weapons, its means, its method of government ;" or in his dissection of the "sea-green incorrupti- ble." Possibly there is even a trace of prejudice in his judgments on Robespierre and St. Just, and he, perhaps, makes the most of a detail impugning the sexual morality of the latter, which he borrows from the unpublished memoirs of an old medical member of the Convention, Baudot, bequeathed to M. Quinet, and in his hands. • The work is indeed essentially the bitter fruit of exile. It is impossible to mistake the fact that the long arm of French despotism is stretched over the head of the writer, even though dwelling in a Swiss city. It cannot fetter Isis thoughts, but it cramps his pen. He speaks for his countrymen, but in order to reach their ears he knows that he dare not say all. So in reference to the present he is compelled to wrap his thoughts in generalities. The application of his words can only thrill beneath them, as the life-pulse of a veiled human form beneath its robes. Who can mistake it, never- theless, in passages such as this?—

" To what kind of society are we advancing ? There are various issues. But were one to hold as null the protest of certain isolated spirits, one might represent to oneself as follows the principal outlines of those social forms into which we are entering in Europe :—Uncultivated manners without public life, the rudeness of the popular state without a people, democracy without a demos, silence without repose, coarseness without freedom, Bceetia in Byzantium."

It would be time lost to point out one or too contradictions which occur in this noble book. One slight blunder may be noticed, the treating the " Digest " and the " Pandects "—two names for the saute work—as distinct. Perhaps also M. Quinet is a little too chary of quoting authorities. He does not, indeed, strictly confine himself, as a note to the preface announces, to the 'quotation of unpublished works (of which, moreover, almost the only one quoted is the Memoires de Rondo°. But all are not so—,well read as himself in the history of his subject, and those who are not would often like to know the sources from which he has .drawn. At the same time, not the slightest slur is hereby sought to be cast on M. Quinet's accuracy, on which those who are „acquainted with his historical works know that they have reason to rely.