"LE DISCIPLE."*
THE novel-reading public sometimes manifests unaccountable freaks of attention and neglect. We see it announced that two orthodox writers have combined their powers to answer a novel in which, whatever its other merits, we should have said that theology was conspicuous by its absence; and no one can say that these writers have done anything thereby to call attention to a book previously unnoticed. And during almost the whole time in which people have been reading and talking about Robert Elsmere, they might have followed, in the adventures of Robert Greslou, a study of the decay of Christian faith showing some further equipment for the investigation than the literary power in which it at least equals that which has been occupying them ; while , Mr. Lilly's interesting article in the Contemporary Review is, as far as we know, the first sign that the work has found an English reader. We propose to follow in his steps, and intro- duce to our readers a book which it is misleading to describe as a novel. It has, indeed, all the interest of a novel: the narra- tive moves as though it were no more impeded with philo- sophic baggage than the last adventure of a young man and maiden in request at Mudie's ; but many a volume of history, in our opinion, gives less information as to that which is the true object of history,—the spirit and tendency of an age. No mature reader need shrink from its perusal. It is not, of course, written for the same class of readers as those addressed by the ordinary English novelist. It is the story of a seduc- tion, made in the interests of science, and told in plain language. But when we say that it does not contain a single suggestion unnecessarily detaining the reader in those regions where the moral eye, as it were, closes itself involuntarily, we pay a high tribute to its fundamental purity. And as for those readers (we are inclined to wish there were more of them) who turn away from fictitious narratives unsuited for free discussion in the social circle, we can only advise them to turn also from any attempt to study theology in fiction. The last thing is impossible without the first.
Robert Greslou is the disciple of a certain Adrien Slate, whose portrait, forming the frontispiece to the work, has led us to reconsider, though not to discard, a strong literary objection to the representation of genius in fiction. The
• Le Disciple. Par Paul Bourget. Parki i!Alphonse Lemerre. 1389 personality of a thinker is brought before us with more truth in this delineation of a personage who, as depicted here, does not exist, than in many volumes of biography.* We cannot deny that our objection is illustrated here. We are told that M. Sixth is a philosopher of striking originality, and find nothing original in his ideas,--a common enough experience, no doubt, and one of many instances in which fiction ought to be more coherent than experience. But the portrait of the "French Herbert Spencer," as he is called, is a moral necessity to the work. It would lose its broad, catholic tone, and descend to the level of the ordi- nary polemic religions novel, if the crime of the disciple lost the background supplied by the pure and virtuous character of the master. Test the influence of all doctrines, M. Bourget seems to say, on the characters not of those who teach, but of those who learn them. A hideous crime may illustrate the tendencies of a doctrine taught by one described as "Ca. Saint Laique, comme on l'efit appele aussi justement que le venerable Emile Littre,"—a comparison we can hardly translate by the substitution of any single English name. We may bring its effect home to an English reader in the words of the servant who manages that this lay saint shall eat no meat on Friday, and takes other measures for his salvation : "Le bon Dieu ne serait le bon Dieu s'il avait le cceur de le damner." The philosopher, we are told, " etait compose de trois individus comme emboites les uns dans les autres : ii y avait en lui le bonhomme Sixte, vieux garcon asservi aux soins meticuleux de ea. servante et soucieux d'abord de sa tran- quillite materielle. fly avait ensuite le polemiste philosophique, fantair pour tout dire, anime, a son insu, du feroce amour propre commun a thus les ecrivains. Ti y avait ensuite le grand psychologue, passionnement attache aux problemes de la vie interieure." We need hardly say that the fidgety old bachelor is delineated much more forcibly than the great psychologist. We are shown with great vividness the egotism which allows a trivial inconvenience to self to eclipse the interests of life and death to another, which, when confronted with an apparent murder traced to a connection with his teaching, finds room, side by side with a natural distress at such a responsibility, for a perturbation quite as serious at the notion of having to pack his bag for a possible journey to the town where the assize is to be held. And when we come to the teaching which has procured the philosopher his European reputation, we find only that he is a determined enemy of all religion, hating Christianity as "a disease of humanity," and that he is the author of a hypothesis on the origin of sexual love which his disciple wishes to verify. There seems nothing very remarkable about these doctrines ; if there were, of course the author would not be writing novels. However, the philosopher's fame, if not justified, is vividly brought home to us. We are made to feel, in the account of the trial in which he is involved by his pupil's psychological experiments, that when he appears upon the scene, all eyes are turned towards him, and all his gestures remembered. And, on the whole, we believe, just as in actual life, that M. Sixte must be a wonderful man, though when we have to do with him, he seems very much like other people.
One of the most lasting effects of a Catholic education, we have heard it said, is the impulse to confession. The remark has been brought home to us by the autobiography of the ei-devant pious Catholic, in which the absolute unreserve of • the confessional is made use of to thrust on the reluctant ear of the philosopher an account of the practical bearing of his teaching. The conception is full of significance, though when we come to what ought to be its most striking part, the result of the confession on the mind of the philosopher, we are obliged to pronounce it disappointing. We should pro- bably have felt it disappointing in real experience. The great crises of life are apt to manifest nothing more vividly than the shallowness of our nature; but this is another instance where fiction should be, as Bacon says of poetry, "by so much greater than the world." And the confession itself, we think, should have been less hideous ; the criminal should have had some shadow of excuse. The family where Robert Greslou is received as a tutor might have done something to slacken the claims of a confidence he abuses so basely, or his victim herself, a delicate shadow, might in some way have provoked revenge with scorn. The guilt would be less revolting, if it were
• The study, we are told, is made from Nature. In that case, M. Bourget must hare either endowed his philosopher with his European reputation, or changed his nationality.
more diffused. M. Bourget might reply to us that any such attempt to soften the crime of his hero would have confused its motive. He desires to paint no vulgar seducer, but a votary of science, seeking to enrich psychology with that true scientific method which his teacher in his examination before the juge d'instruction is led to avow as desirable, while he seems to regret its impossibility. What the master entertains as a remote suggestion, becomes with the disciple an irresistible motive. He looks on the world of persons and of things as an unbroken unity, where the methods appropriate to the lower stages are appropriate throughout, or rather, where there is neither higher nor lower, but only more or less complicated, earlier or later. Science is to him the correlative to all Being. To know a person, as to know a thing, is to know all qualities of which the nature is capable ; to find in Self not a unity, but an assemblage of transitory desires, where the dgdoublement du 2aoi, even though it take the aspect of false- hood, comes legitimately into play as a hypothesis suggesting experiment. He has learned from his master to carry this train of thought to its logical conclusion :—" Pour le philosophe II n'y a zii crime, ni vertu; nos volitions soul des faits d'ini certain ordre regis par certains lois, voila tout."
The contrast vividly worked out, between a discipleship of the most spiritual character, and a seduction that begins in cold intellectual design and ends in bestiality, is intended we presume, to teach several lessons. It reproduces a warning needful as a check both on admiration and the reverse, to judge no human being by a single relation ; it points (as we have said) the contrast between the influence of beliefs in the teacher, moulded on a different view, and the scholar, really drinking into his moral system the influence of what he learns. But what we have felt most significant in the contrast between the disciple of Adrien. Sixte and the seducer of Charlotte de Jussat, is a warning as to the direction in which the moral bearing of materialism is first to be looked for. Many relations will be long unaffected by it, some, we are certain, will be delivered from much that is disturbing, and will appear to be elevated and purified, for a time. But that which we look to see obviously and immediately injured is the relation of man to woman. Robert Greslou does not, indeed, remain in his pursuit the cold scientific investigator, nor even the fierce animal who lurks always in the neighbourhood of such a one. We are given to understand that he really loves Charlotte de Jussat at last, and the promise of a double suicide under which she yields herself to him, though futile, is for the moment sincere. But we are made to feel that when he loves her most—and the pure and innocent figure is painted with unquestionable love—he loves her less than his master. The whole record has a tone of pity rather than love, and of pity by no means overpowering. He can record without any but egotistic feelings, her horror when she sees after his success that he does not mean to keep the promise of dying with her which alone had induced her to yield herself to him ; the ghastly discovery which awaits her when in her madness, driven to actions foreign to her nature, she forces the lock of the journal to which he has confided what he calls the processes of the laboratory, and learns that the love to which she has sacrificed her virtue is in truth the mask of a plot for her ruin, conceived with revolting coolness, though disturbed with the invasion of passion. The account of all the hideous torture which he inflicts on an innocent being whom in some sense he loved, is given with cold, scientific detail; he does, indeed, speak of remorse, but it is a slight and fitful feeling, avowed as one element in the complex result, but not the only or the chief one. Such feeling as he has to spare from the interests of science is altogether for himself.
With the suicide of the high-born and dishonoured girl, the story, we think, should have ended. The complications which lead to the suicide being supposed a murder, the account of the trial, the appeal by which the philosopher extorts the truth from the victim's brother, and his melodramatic revenge, all strike us as somewhat confused, and more commonplace than what precedes. The epilogue does not lack interest ; but as compared with the bulk of the story, we should say it. lacks significance, and we will leave it out of consideration in. the brief expression of the lesson to be derived from the book with which we will conclude this review.
It is commonly supposed, and much experience encourages the belief, that the decay of faith touches only that side of man's nature on which he consciously turns towsscis the divine. The moral of is Disciple lies in its refutation of this belief. What we call faith is not the organ by which we discern God as distinguished from man, but that by which we discern the world of persons, as distinguished from the world of things. We cannot know men otherwise than by faith, any more than we can know God ; but we can dream that we know them as we know the things that lie about us—by observation, by experiment, and by inference from what we hear and see. And if we accept this knowledge as the basis of human intercourse, we shall find its canons are changed. Specially shall we find this—we do already find it—in all that concerns the relations of man and woman. For man and woman, as a mystic writer has said, are each to each the image of God ; the special love which unites them has in it a nearer approach to that love which unites man to God than any other love; and when the element of the invisible dies out of this love, it changes its nature for something that has all the results of hatred. "We want more facts," we have heard it said, with reference to the sins that follow lust. M. Bourget shows what it is to seek facts in this region, what human relation becomes when one human being seeks to know another by loveless investigation. We may see it, alas ! else- where than in fiction already; our children will have it yet more forcibly brought home to them. But the opposite principle will be shown them also, for the object of faith is the source of love, and to attempt their severance is to discern their ultimate and eternal unity.
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