BOOKS.
THE ROMANCE OF FRENCH CALVINISM.* GOITER has remarked that few people start in life with such high advantages of training as cultivated French Calvinists. Taking his remark to mean persons who have been educated out of sectarian narrowness, while they have not overgrown the first principles of their faith, it may cordially be accepted. The powers of reserve and self-reliance which Puritan family life tends to develop, are nowhere less likely to degenerate into formalism and austerity than among a vivacious and highly impressible people. The sunshine of the Tuileries seems to alternate with the shadows of Sinai. Again, we are inclined to regard it as a great advantage that French Protestants are a mere minority in their own country struggling for protection and recog, aitien. At the risk of being a little less national they are more.eos- mopolitan, and cannot help regarding la perfide Albion as the ark of the true faith. Moreover, religion itself gains where its divisions are as broad as the whole compass of Italian and German thought. To an educated foreigner, papers like the Record or the English Churchman are simply inexplicable; their topics of interest seem about as important, in a spiritual sense, as the difference between tweedle-dum and: tweedle-dee; and the guardians of Christ's Church appear to be doing battle for the colour of an altar-cloth, while the worshippers are silently stealing away. Let him turn to a religious novel, and he finds himself in a new and very small world, furnished with lecterns and faldstools, peopled with governesses and prigs, occupied with rubrics and religious millinery, and believing that Christ died to make all men Anglicans. The contrast between Mr. Gresley's or Miss Sewell's books and those of Madame de Gasparin is a little humbling to our national self-love. The Frenchwoman has evidently lived in a world where the questions at issue were not the merits of rival sects, but its whole relations of Christianity to human nature and history. Why we are born and live, why it is a great and beautiful thing to believe, whether we shall carry our thoughts and loves into the world beyond the grave, are the topics that underlie atter narra- tives and discussions. Born a poet, and evidently endowed with powers that would be rare in any country, she has happily adopted M. Michelet's paradox, that the true poets of France are its prose writers. In other countries a poet may draw upon a reserve of lan- guage and image, which would be inappropriate in prose-writing; in France the term and the thing "poetical licence" are unknown; rhyme only weights the runner. Idyls of country and home life, the philosophy of her faith expressed in pictures, reason tried by a life's experience and by the heart of a very noble woman, make up the three little volumes that have lately startled French society from its quiet contempt for Protestantism. Praise of Mr. Mill in the Record, unless he were Premier and had bishoprics in his gift, would scarcely be more wonderful than the Revue des Den: Mondes admiring tales for young people by a Calvinist lady.
One or two instances will suffice to show the general tone and scope of Madame de Gasparin's writings. The last story in the .Near Horizons, is entitled " Lisette's Dream." Lisette is the old wife of a farmer of the Jura, who has grown up among the occupa- tions of the dairy and the kitchen, without newspapers, and, virtually, with no literature except the Bible. "The revolution of '89 she re- membered it not overmuch ; its terrible echoes had but beat feebly against the strong wall of the Jura with its solid courses. All this riot that is let loose in France, the days of July, and so many other glorious ones, the cannonades of the risings, and the shouts for the
• Los Horizon., "roaming, les Horizon, Mutes, et Vesper. Par Madame de Gas- porta. D. Nutt. Republic, and the acclainations that welcomed the Empire, all died away upon the moss of the woods, among the leaves of the beeches. The wadings of the wind which sweeps through the firs have a louder voice, a never-dying moan, which rise above all others. Higher than the glorious country she dwelt in, beyond the limits of actual life, a world lay open before Lisette. It bad unfolded itself from her earliest years. It was the Hebrew world. There the caravans of camels, with the Ishmaelite merchants, passed through, the desert ; there Hagar wept under the palm-tree ; there the transparent waves of the Red Sea piled themselves up in two walls ; there more golden sheaves, silkier ears, quivered in the fields of Bethlehem under a softer breeze which had wooed the flowers of the pomegranate. Then it was Sinai smoking; it was Moses, his face shining with a strange bright- ness, breaking the tables of the law before the frantic people as they danced." But a woman whose vision is thus fixed upon the unsub- stantial memories of the past is not likely to be careless of the future ; and precisely because Lisette is ignorant of the world, "the great problem of eternity remains unchangingly before her, one side lighted up by faith, the other darkened by doubt." At last she is troubled by a dream. She seems to be walking on the grass by the side of a dusty road on which rich and poor are going forward, like the crowd of a market-day. She cannot explain to herself the secret of her baste or the end of her journey. Near her is a rugged mountain-path, the course of a torrent, in which two or three wayfarers are sadly picking their steps among the stones and bushes. They seem to look wistfully towards Lisette, yet not enviously, but as if pitying her and desiring her companionship; she tries to join them, but the stones slip under her feet ; she stumbles and is disheartened. She returns to the old track with a weight on her heart. Presently, she seems to understand that they are all travelling towards death. She looks round and finds that the crowd has disappeared, that the mountain- course is no longer visible, that she is alone on a trackless expanse of turf, with a great square house before her, its walls of gold glittering like the mid-day sun, and the red light of the west streaming through its crystal windows upon the turf. At one of these windows, an old woman, grey-haired, dressed in black silk, with a mild yet stern ex- pression, is sitting and spinning. Lisette approaches and cries out to her. "You have deceived yourself," is the answer; "you have not taken the right road ; you cannot enter in, my daughter." She re- sumes her knitting, and Lisette seems, in her dream, to fall as one dead. Neither can she shake off the impression when she awakes : "the abject fear of the slave palsies her heart." Madame de Gasparin does not attempt to argue with her, but she reminds her of the day when three men hung together upon the cross, and when Jesus de- clared God's pardon to the penitent thief. " ' That thief entered in, Lisette. What road, then, had he taken?' Lisette was silent, col- lecting herself; a divine light rolled away the shadows upon her brow. 'Neither the wide road nor the terrible mountain-course; is it not so, Lisette ?' Lisette looked at me, her beautiful black eyes kindled, the soft and subtle smile played upon her lips. (He believed,' she said. That day we talked no more philosophy."
Those who analyze this story will find it difficult to believe that any part of it is invention. In the quaint mixture of sublime and homely illustration, the pilgrimage along the broad and narrow path, the irresistible fate that urges the wayfarers, and the palace four- square like the city of the New Jerusalem, while all along heaven is conceived as a great house, and its guardian as an old woman, it recals more than anything the old Norse legends which grew up in the fusing time of paganism and Christianity. Here, naturally, the Christian conception predominates, and there is nothing grotesque in the idea that underlies the story. From the thought of God's infi- nite mercy to the soul, Madame de Gasparin sometimes passes to the artistic view of Christianity, as the one beautiful and pure element in coarse and ignoble lives. In the story of "A Poor Boy" she describes with exquisite yet tender humour the awkward and dull boy of the vil- lage, half-witted, except that he can work and keep from fallin,1 into the fire, the butt of his school-fellows, despised and loathedby his father, who thinks him a discredit to the family; in the days of his health dragged into mischief by his comrades for the mere pleasure of ex- posing him ; later on, cuffed and worked hard, cowering for hours in the corner when he is at home; and at last slowly dying under M-
ug and hard living. Yet that boy having taken the Bible on faith,
as he has taken all other knowledge from his mother, believes in Christ, not as an abstraction, but as a friend, as one who has borne hunger and insult, who has touched the leper, who is his brother as well as his God, with whom he does not feel awkward. So skilful are the touches, that we get to identify the human element in Ulysses with the germ of religious ideality. In another story—that of "The Sculptor"—a starving man of genius is married to a vulgar and affected woman, "playing comedy in earnest." "She talked about Providence, about the Supreme Being; she was rich in pious twaddle. He coughed, looked at me, and turned away." He is
silent throughout on religious matters, but we feel instinctively that the reserved- gentleman, absorbed in moulding plaster, is the true ex- emplar of Christianity, and has higher moral experiences than his garrulous vulgar wife. In one part of Vesper, Madame de Gasparin rises above the level of common life to parable. The story of "Emmanuel" is an answer to Mr. Hawthorne's "Goodman Brown," written, as Madame de Gasparin
bitterly puts it, "to establish the universal reign of Satan," as if life were in very earnest a witches' carnival, with Satan swaying the
hearts of those who seem noblest and purest. In "Emmanuel," a
drunken degraded man is leaving his home in despair; his wife, seduced by a disloyal friend, taunts him from the window, and bids
him kill himself if he dare. He staggers down the streets, and is about to plunge headlong into the muddy waters of the Seine, when he feels himself held back by an arm stronger than his own. He is led away, and gradually the wild whirl of his thoughts is quieted, and scenes too real to be dreams pass before him. He seems to have left the street, to be travelling through a new country, hill and valley, with a starry heaven overhead. The prayers he has prayed at his mOther'a.knee timing upon him, pleasant faces of his childhood re- appear, the, Bible he has thumbed and read as a boy opens again before his -eyes. Gradually the false friends of his manhood come on the scent.• But all their surroundings are changed. The sceptic, whose .pitiless scoffs undermined his faith, is kneeling and praying the prayer of the publican. His wife—now she seems to come towards him, but she 'disappears again. Is there no mercy for her? His guide bids him wait. A young girl passes; the daughter whom Victor allowed to grow up among brutal men and loose words, appears modest and reserved, holding on her arm her mother's aged father, once a hoary buffoon, and now in all the tranquil dignity of old age. But his wife? Victor. no longer thinks of her with passion or bitterness, but her name is graven on his heart ineffaceably. Suddenly he seems to be on the shores of the sea. An emigrant ship in the distance is tossing, a help- less wreck, upon the waves. Here sailors are blaspheming; now a boat puts off, and his wife's seducer is among the rescued, and leaves his victim to her fate; there a missionary is announcing God's promises to the last congregation he will exhort. Deserted, infamous, mise- rable, the woman turns to him who saved the Magdalene; the words of pardon seem to burn within her, "tears flow over her cheeks. Jesus, Jesus ! A flame, a beauty, a smile light. up her face." A cry of joy rises above the waves, as the ship suddenly settles down. Victor's heart seems to break. But there is still something left for him ; one whom he must forgive, and see forgiven. The next scene is in the backwoods of America, where an angry crowd is about to lynch the seducer, Martial, for new crimes. Victor hurries to his side and urges him to repent. The miserable man shrinks away in shame and despair when Victor's guide approaches, and shows him the pale face and bleeding hands that were seen on Calvary. The man's heart heaves with a sob of penitence. Thus the life has found its completion; good has triumphed finally over evil ; and the shining shores of heaven with its white-robed people holding palm-branches open before the dreamer's eye. He is one of the heavenly company. Great as the beauty of this last story is, there is too much sudden- ness in some of the changes to be quite natural or satisfactory. We are apt to distrust the pleas for mercy that are raised "between the saddle and the ground." But the faith that looks upon love as the one true and abiding power, the universal law in which death is swallowed up, has a logic of its own which we cannot question. Nor. does Madame de Gasparin, in fact, hold that the present life is without influence upon the future, or that we shall not carry our acts and words with us into eternity. Two of her most beautiful chapters in the Heavenly Horizons are on "The Terrible Para- dise" and on "Personal Identity." She protests against the con- ception that there are "two worlds altogether different, two peoples absolutely strange to one another," or that heaven is to be peopled with rows of zeros. "Dazzling as you may make the Void, if it is always the Void there is an end of personality—where indivi- dual life is extinguished and absorbed. I see nothing but an abyss. Did I fathom it for ages, I should ascend again in the same luminous column, for ever lost in it." She analyzes with exquisite scorn the paradise of painters, "a liquid blue gradually lighting up," and peopled with "glorified figures attitudinizing on a pair of wings ;" everywhere "the same look, the same smile, the same lips half- opened in the same ecstasy." She is not dazzled by Dantes mag- nificent style to admire the spheres that circle in a serene atmo- sphere, and the companies of the blest wheeling round in a holy transport and chanting praise. She asks if "the distant gleam of this glory can dry our tears on earth." As a matter of justice she cannot understand the reward of a future life when there is no per- son to be rewarded. Stronger still on questions of the heart, she asks what heaven can give her if it cannot give back her memories. "I have seen a father depart; I am to find a nameless being in his place. All my life has been blended with the life of a friend ; no- thing of our old fondness is to remain. I shall take my place as a stranger by the side of strangers." "I alone, known only to myself and God, remain erect among the ruins of the world. The idea is immoral and mad—as the loss of identity, as the loss of memory. In 'fine, this is only the old empirical method : fire and the sword. Let us hew down, let us burn, let us destroy : it is more easy to govern desolation than life." From our point of view it is only weakening arguments like these when Madame de Gasparin proceeds to prove from the Bible that Moses and Elias were recognized at the transfiguration, or that the saints who came out of the graves after the resurrection and went into the holy city., had preserved the sem- blance of their former selves. But little points of detail do not affect her final conclusion, that "the river of 1.4ethe does not water the Christian Paradise." Only the weaknesses, the degradation, and the sins of our past life shall not rise again with us. It is one of the strangest and grandest features in this "Divina Commedia" of a Cal- vinistic poet, that Hell is nowhere denied, nowhere asserted, and no- where seen.
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