BOOKS.

EDGAR QUINET.* Tue fault of this book is not a common one,—that it is too modest. Mr. Heath would have done better if he had made a completer book, if he had carried Quinet's career to its close, instead of limiting himself to his early life and writings ; and also if he had given us more of a criticism upon them, and boldly assumed more of the function of an interpreter, and less of that of a mere expositor. It is unsatisfactory to conclude the account of Quinet just when he has fully gained his footing in the world of letters, and English readers, for whom this book is intended, would have taken more pleasure in the somewhat heavy flights of Quinet's imagination, if Mr. Heath had assisted them by some criticism of his own, showing at what, in his opinion, Quinet had aimed, how far he had succeeded in his aim, and what was unsatis- factory and nebulous in his delineation. We are aware that what Mr. Heath really wishes is to create a thirst in English readers for the writings of Quinet, to send English men and women to the original, and that it was with the deliberate purpose of doing so that he has so completely suppressed him- self. However, we believe that he would have done more to inspire the desire to make acquaintance with Quinet, if he had conveyed to us a, more adequate conception of what he him- self has learned from him, than any we can gain from a book so entirely introductory and expository. Nevertheless, this volume is a very interesting one, and we do not see why it should not be followed by another, in which Mr. Heath might conclude the story of Quinet's life, and give us his own criticism on its moral and literary significance.

That Edgar Quinet was a man of genius, no one who reads Mr. Heath's volume will for a moment doubt, though whether he was a poet whose poetic creations will live, most readers will be inclined, in spite of the very strong affirmative judgment of Heine, to doubt very much. That he was a man of vivid and very excitable imagination is clear enough, but he had, we think, so much more of the suggestive than he had of the forma- tive and artistic imagination, that his principal poems will be apt to appear to most people, vague, dim, misty backgrounds, on which huge, inchoate shapes move fitfully. Ahasuerus, for in- stance, though it seems to have made a very powerful impression on the minds of a few, has hardly enough of what is definite in it to fascinate the imaginations of practical men. It is a world of tendency which is delineated in it, rather than a world of definite life or thought,—and a world of tendency so obscurely delineated, that one does not much wonder to find the author complaining that the meaning of the epilogue had been interpreted as precisely the reverse of that which he himself attached to it. Quinet was, to our thinking, greater in criticism than in poetry. In criticism, his mind, which leaned rather to the vague, was brought to a point by collision with something alien to himself, and he often • Edgar Quinet: His Early Life and Writings. Hy Richard Heath. London: Trttbner and Co.

shows very great sagacity and acuteness as a critic. As Mr. Heath justly says, considering that it was the year 1831 when Quinet wrote of Germany what is summarised as follows, no one can fail to acknowledge the singular power of his political prescience :—

"Laughing scornfully at the antiquated notions of his countrymen concerning their Teutonic neighbours, Qainet told them of a Germany disgusted with dreamy metaphysics and literary cosmopolitanism, re- garding France with unbounded bitterness, and bent only on realising its own unity. The Power designed by its own peculiar characteristics and the popular feeling of Germany to take the lead in this great move- ment was Prussia. Its despotism, he said, unites whatever is most prac- tical and most ideal, and proies that the care of material interests can exist in connection with brilliant theorising and a transcendental philosophy. He thought it far more menacing than that of Austria, for it is not only in the government, but in the people, in the manners and parvenu tone of the national spirit. Prussia never loses sight of the destinies of the German nations ; at the present time, it invades them by its intelligence, later on it will, if it can, do so by force. All this restless, enterprising despotism wants, is the man who clearly understands its destiny."

As Mr. Heath remarks, this was written and published at a time when Prince Bismarck, who was to realise Quinet's pro- phecy, was but eighteen years of age. Heine, in his remarkable criticism of Quinet, acknowledges that there was something in his character which gave him a special affinity with the Germans ; and this is the more curious because, though he had both Swiss and Italian blood in him as well as French, he does not appear to have had any trace of German blood. Heine speaks of him thus :—

Quinet has a northern nature, be might be a German ; for he has altogether the German character, in the good as in the bad ac- ceptation of the word ; the German air breathes in all his writings. When I read Ahasuerus, or any of the other poetical works of Quinet, I feel exactly as if I were at home. I fancy I can hear the nightingales of my own land ; I smell the perfume of the Suabian violets ; sounds from the garden, I know so well, murmur round my head ; moreover, I bear the chime of the well-known bells; pro- f ondeur allemancie,douleur de penseur allemande, sensibilitd allemande, bourdonnement de hanne tons demands; with at times just the least touch of German wearisomeness. Yes, Edgar Quinet is oars; he is German, good German stuff, notwithstanding his late assumption of the airs of one who threatens to eat us alive. The rude and rather uncouth manner in which he has attacked Germany in the Revue des Deus Mondes is anything but French, but precisely like that down- right fisticuff, that genuine roughness, by which we recognise a fellow-countryman. Edgar is entirely German, not only in mind, but in body ; and whoever meets him in the streets takes him for a cer- tainty to be some theologian from Halle, who, having broken down in his examinations, has dragged his heavy steps to France, there to dissipate his moody humour. A massive, austere form, carelessly dressed. A large grey overcoat, that might have been stitched by our tailor-author, Jung Stilling. Boots that have perhaps been re- soled by the philosophic shoemaker, Jacob Behme. Quinet for a long time has lived on the other side of the Rhine, especially at Heidel- berg, where he made certain studies, and daily intoxicated himself in the lucubrations of Creuzer on. Symbols. He wandered all over Ger- many on foot, visited our Gothic ruins, and fraternised with the most eminent spectres. In the forest of Teutoberg, where Arminius, the prince of the Chernsci, beat Vann and his legions, Quinet ate West- phalian ham with Pumpernickel. Whether he also visited at Moeln the tomb of Ealenspiegel, of grotesque and popular memory, I am not in a position to say ; but what I do know positively is, that there are not now three poets in the whole world who are gifted with as much imagination, such wealth of ideas, and such originality as Edgar Quinet."

No doubt, this singular strain of the German in Quinet enabled him to understand the drift and tendency of German life as few others understood it, and he seems to us to betray much of the uncouthness of German genius in his prose poems. When you compare Goethe's prologue in Heaven, in Faust, to the com- mencement of Ahasuerus—the Wandering .Tew—a "mystery," as Quinet truly called it, and a mystery intended to portray the history of man on earth,—you see with wonder that Quinet was more German even than Goethe, and certainly very much less of an artist. It is impossible not to smile, as we read the very flat opening of this mystery,—

" PROLOG17S.

'Paz dons is Ciel : Hosannah ! Hosannah !'

Gabriel : Silence ! le Seigneur vs parler, Le Pere kternel.'

" icoutez, Saint Michel, Thomas, Bonaventure, grand Saint Hubert qui fetes Eveque a Liege, et irons Pythagoras, Joseph le juste, et Marcus Tullius. Depuis mille ans et plus vos epreaves sent faites, at vos ernes out moute des limbes an plus haat escabeau du Paradis, corntne autrefois la rosee des joncs de marecage, quand le eoleil l'apportait sons meg pieds. Vous le saves, lea temps sent accomplis. II y atantet trois mine claque cent ans quo le jagement dernier se fit dans Josaphat. Voyez ! an fond des cienx, la terra en tremble encore; eperdue, elle mule, et ne Bait plus son chemin," &c.

There is a comical flatness in that—especially in the

explanatory "qui fates Eveque h LiSge,"—which strikes a dull key-note, and the same jar recurs constantly throughout this strange, dim, and yet hard poem. One can hardly restrain a smile when the Cathedral of Strasburg muses after this- fashion :— " kcontez ! ecoutez ! sans mentir, je vais trona dire mon secret pour no pas °miler. Les nombres me eont sacres : ear leur harmonie m'appuie sans pear. Mes deux tours et ma net font le nombre trois, et la Trinite. Mes eept chapelles, Rees h mon eke, sont mes septa mysteres, qui me serrent les flancs. Ah, quo lens ombre eat noire et muette et profonde !"

Nor can one even shiver at what seems to us the thoroughly grotesque bathos of the epilogue in which Eternity complains of being alone once more, after the Eternal Father and Son are- buried in a frozen star, and holds the following absurd con- versation with Nothingness :— " L'Eternitd.

J'ai deja jete dans l'abime mon serpent qui se mord la queue de desespoir.

Le Ndant.

An mourn, moi, vons me garderez ; je tiens pen de place.

L'Eternite.

/Weis tu fais trop de bruit. Ni etre, ni !leant; je no venz

plus que moi. Le Ndant.

Qui done vons gardera dans yeas desert ?

L'Eternite.

Mot! Le Meat.

Et, si ce n'est moi, qui porters I votre place votre couronne ?

L'Eternitd.

Mot !"

That combines the rugged abstractness of the German min& with the French tendency to the falsetto sublime, which in this case, as it seems to us, does not border upon, but fairly rushes into the ridiculous. And though Ahasuer. us- certainly contains much that is fine in conception,—which we do not attempt, and the present writer is, indeed, incompetent, to estimate,—it is at once so abstract, so shadowy in its outlines, and so violent in its imaginative effects, that we cannot conceive its ever ranking among the permanent imaginative works of French literature.

On the other hand, that Quinet had personally nothing of unreality, or of literary charlatanerie, about him, in spite of this straining after impossible effects, no reader of Mr. Heath's Life will doubt at all. From his childhood, he had that absolute self-restraint and that spirit of self-sacrifice which are- all but inconsistent with anything pretentious and ostentatious in a man's character, as the following touching anecdote will,

sufficiently illustrate :—

" Edgar had two friends, Leon and Charles Brays, who also learnt- to play the violin. One day Charles played a piece so badly that Madame Brays stopped him, and asked Edgar to play it. But he obstinately refused. His mother scolded and he looked cross, until at last, finding no entreaties would prevail, the elders shrugged their shoulders and gave it up. When they were alone, his mother began to upbraid him. Didn't you see,' he said, that Charles had played badly, and that if I had tried the same piece, his father and mother and grandfather would have thought that I played better than he did ?' Some days after, being alone in his room, Madame Brays. overheard him playing this very piece. I see bow it was Edgar would not play that piece the other day,' and she ran into the room,, and embracing him, told him. He became very red, struggled to get away, and ran out of the room."

His vehement temper may be conceived from an anecdote of his self-scorn and self-reprobation for the passion he felt as a youth for a beautiful girl, whom he held to be unworthy of him :—

" She had the bust and mien of an antique statue : a Roman pro- file, a rather low brow, with clusters of Jet-black hair, dressed and bound like sculptured tresses, eyes motionless Jmt sparkling under their dark lashes, a neck swan-like, a Southern complexion—alto- gether the dazzling look of an Agrippina. Edgar felt as if another soul than his own had mastered him, and was going to lead him wherever it pleased. He struggled, he groaned, he reasoned with himself, he tried every artifice he could think of ; do what he would, he could not get rid of the intruder. By a sure presentiment, he knew that he should never find behind this finely-chiselled form a heart to answer to his own. And yet the fascination of her beauty held him enchained in more than iron bonds. Certines, once so beloved, became insupportable. Its gentle, rustic melancholy ill– consorted with the classic beauty of Pulcheria. He longed to go to Italy, to Greece, to shores lapped by the deep blue of the Mediter- ranean. He made great walks in an aimless sort of way, passing the distant hills, wandering in wild and lonely spots. But all this energy was to no purpose, until at last his struggles for freedom became maddening. One day, after a long march, gun in hand, be was return- ing home through the marsh lands and by the great ponds ; tired and- oppressed by their heavy vapours, the thought of his bondage became unbearable. He felt himself sinking beneath the load of his chain, and falling a victim into the jaws of fate. In a moment, without

reflection, save that in some indistinct, almost unconscious way there was a rash appeal to destiny to decide whether he should live to be a man or not, he cocked his gun, put the barrel in his month, and ran some fifty paces. It was a moment of chaos; never did he fall lower."

That helps us to understand a good deal of what, to English readers, will appear the flashy extravagance of his prose poems. He had the southern temperament, combined with a good deal of the northern love for hard and wide abstractions. Mr. Heath gives us ample means of judging of Quinet's personal character, and we grow in our warm appreciation of it with every page of his personal history.

We doubt whether Mr. Heath's claim for Quinet, that he is a sort of prophet to our age of what it chiefly needs, can be sus- tained. M. Quinet's religious philosophy, at least as here traced by Mr. Heath, is genial and sound, but has very little in it of the guidance we now want most. There is too little in it of concrete answer to the difficulties of the day, and too much of vague and shadowy religiosity. Quinet seems to us more successful as a historian and as a critic than as a religious teacher. When he tries to delineate the genius of a man or of a people with whom he has very strong sympathy, there is sure to be something original and remarkable in the outline of the picture. Take, for instance, this account of the genius of Michael Angelo :—

"Michael Angelo is quite otherwise. He has neither master nor past. If a real relationship to Dante and the Pisan sculptors can be seen in him, there is also something of the harshness of civil discord, of the vehemence of Savonarola, of the tumultuous spirit of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines ; he has, above all, the spirit of infalli- bility, which owes nought to any but to himself. He makes, he increases tradition ; he does not receive it. He governs, he reigns, in the same way as the Pope. In his Biblical platonism he has glimpses of ideas, forms ; he alone perceives them, yet he imposes them on the world, and the world submits. His works are decrees, his God is the God of excommunication, his Madonna that of vengeance, his heaven a menacing one. In Michael Angelo there is something of Gregory VII., just as there is something of Leo X. in Raffaelle."

Or this, of the spiritual timidity in Roman literature :— " Thus these people, so intrepid in bloodshed, were more timid than any in the world of spirits. From Virgil to Statius there is but one voice on this subject. The cry of Lucretius pierces the temples as of a soul long stifled by terror in a conventional world that has suddenly found its liberty in the Infinite. The more the witnesses of antiquity are examined, the more does it appear certain that the basis of the religion of a Roman was fear of the intelligible universe. He seems to exist in a sort of spiritual panic, which distinguishes nothing, measures nothing ; adoring without choice every power of which he hears, the wicked as much as the good : bad Fortune; the goddess Febris—fever ; the goddess Cloacina, who presided over the sewers ; and the god Terror himself. A clap of thunder, a flash of lightning, the fall of a grasshopper, is enough to make these masters of the world turn pale. When faith has disappeared, there still re- mains in them a depth of stupor which discovers itself in every matter in which religion is concerned. Decorum, Custom, become for them so many gods-termini which they dare not displace. Bold- ness of character, timidity in thought,— this is still the temperament of the modern nations of the Latin race."

There is true genius in such criticisms as these, and M. Quinet's account of the spirit of more than one religion is very remark- able. We cannot say, however, that we find in him, as Mr. Heath appears to have found, the prophet whom this age chiefly needs. To us, he seems at his best when his aim is most limited. When he is discussing the profound doubts of the age, be lingers so long in appreciating and even exaggerating their meaning, that he has little energy left for the specific answer to them. He only conveys his own strong assurance that that answer will, in the end, be found.