The Études de la Nature appeared in three volumes towards the end of 1784. It did not then comprise the fragments of l'Arcadie, which have been since added to it, nor Paul and Virginia, which the author had cut out in consequence of an adventure that has been recounted a thousand times, and that we must recount yet again in order to give consolation to any disappointed young man who may be breaking his heart because he is not understood.

Mme. Necker had invited him to come and read some of his MSS. aloud, promising that he should have for his audience some distinguished judges. Amongst them were in fact Buffon, the AbbÉ Galiani, Thomas, Necker, and some others. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre chose Paul and Virginia. At first they listened in silence, then they began to whisper, to pay less attention, to yawn, and finally not to listen at all. Thomas fell asleep, those nearest the door slipped out, Buffon looked at his watch and called for his carriage. Necker smiled at seeing some of the women, who dared not appear otherwise touched, in tears. The reading ended, not one of these persons, though trained in the world's deceits, could find a word of praise for the author. Mme. Necker was the only person to speak, and it was to remark that the conversations between Paul and the old man suspended the action of the story, and chilled the reader; that it was "a glass of iced water": a very just definition, but ungracious, and it reduced Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to despair.

He thought he was condemned without appeal, and returned to his house so prostrated in spirit that he thought of burning Paul and Virginia, the Études, and l'Arcadie—all his papers in fact—so as not to be tempted to touch them again. One of the Vernets turned up at this crisis, took pity upon his suffering, had the despised work read over to him, and recognised the charm of it. He applauded, wept, proclaimed it a masterpiece, the MSS. are saved, and the author consoled, without, however, gaining sufficient courage to print a work which had sent Thomas to sleep, and put Buffon to flight. Paul and Virginia remained in a drawer.

It was the same with the fragments of the Arcadie, and with much more reason. L'Arcadie, begun after the publication of the Voyage to the Isle of France, was to be an epic poem in prose in twelve books, and was inspired by TelÉmaque and Robinson Crusoe. Saint-Pierre proposed "to represent the three successive states through which most nations pass: that of barbarism, of nature, and of corruption."[18] Notice in passing this progression. The state of nature is not the first state, it is between the two, after the state of barbarism and before the state of over-civilisation, which proves that before admiring or despising natural man, according to the eighteenth century, it is as well to understand the sense which each writer gives to the words.

The picture of these three states furnished our author with the means of expressing his ideas upon the ideal republic which he proposed to form. Thus l'Arcadie became the instrument of propagandism, just the thing to lead M. de Saint-Pierre to fortune, and he never forgave himself for having given up this work, a little through Rousseau's fault, who proclaimed the plan of the book admirable, but, nevertheless, advised him to re-write it from beginning to end. Jean Jacques acknowledged at the same time, with a smile, that he had ceased to believe in poetical and virtuous shepherds since a certain journey which he had taken beside the Lignon: "I once made an excursion to Forez," he continued, with the geniality of his good days, "solely to see the country of Celadon and Astrea, of which UrfÉ gives us such charming pictures. Instead of loving shepherds, I only saw on the banks of the Lignon farriers, blacksmiths, and edge-tool makers." "What!" cried Saint-Pierre, overwhelmed with astonishment, "that all, in so delightful a country?" "It is only a country of smithies," replied Rousseau. "It was that journey to Forez which cured me of my illusion; up to that time never a year passed without my reading Astrea from end to end. I was acquainted with all its characters. Thus does science rob us of our pleasures.[19]"

It was in the bois de Boulogne, seated under a tree, that Jean Jacques Rousseau taught his astonished disciple not to take the Astrea for history. He also told him with great modesty that he felt himself incapable of governing the Republic of their dreams; that all he could do would be to live in it. This declaration piqued Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; he thought he perceived an underlying criticism, and enlarged with enthusiasm upon the sublime virtues of his future subjects which would make them easy to govern. But even while disputing about it he grew disgusted with l'Arcadie, put it on one side, and used up the materials for his Études. Posterity has no reason to regret it. The fragments which have reached us suggest a work in which the ideas are false and the characters conventional. One reads in it for example: "One could see by her timidity that she was a shepherdess." The contrary is the case in point of fact, and Saint-Pierre knew it better than any one; he who had trotted on foot through the whole of Normandy in quest of models for his heroes, before tracing the portraits of the beautiful CyanÉe of TirteÉ, her father, and their guest Amasis. His rustics seem to be drawn by a wit who is a clumsy imitator of FÉnÉlon. He was quite wise to give it up.

According to his correspondence, the Études de la Nature was begun in 1773. The plan of it was at that time gigantic. He informs us on the first page that he wished "to write a general history of nature, in imitation of Aristotle, of Pliny, of Bacon, and other modern celebrities." He set to work, but he soon acknowledged, in making his observations of a strawberry-plant, that he would never have the time to observe all that there is on the earth. Although the page upon the strawberry-plant has become classical, it is as well to re-read it in order to be able to realise its effect upon readers, who up to that time had dwelt upon our beautiful Mother Earth deaf and blind, without hearing the pulsation of her life, without seeing her prodigious eternal productiveness.

"One summer day ... I perceived upon a strawberry-plant, which had by chance been placed upon my window-sill, a lot of little flies, so pretty, that I became possessed of the wish to describe them. The next day I saw another kind, and of them also I wrote a description. During three weeks I observed thirty-seven different species of them; but they came in such numbers at last, and in so many varieties, that I gave up the study of them, although it was most interesting, because I had not sufficient leisure, or, to tell the truth, sufficient command of language for the task.

"The flies which I did observe were distinguished from each other by their colours, their forms, and their habits. There were some of a golden hue, some silver, some bronze, speckled, striped, blue, green, some dusky, some irridescent. In some the head was round like a turban; in others, flat like the head of a nail. In some they appeared dark like a spot of black velvet; in others, they shone out like a ruby. There was no less variety in their wings; some had them long and brilliant like a sheet of mother-o'-pearl; in others, they were short and broad, resembling the meshes of the finest gauze. Each one had its own way of carrying its wings and of using them. Some carried them erect, and others horizontally, and they seemed to take pleasure in spreading them out. Some would fly, fluttering about like butterflies; others would rise in the air, flying against the wind by aid of a mechanism somewhat resembling toy beetles. Some would alight upon a plant to deposit their eggs; others simply to seek shelter from the sun. But most of them came for reasons which were quite unknown to me; for some flew to and fro in perpetual movement, while others only moved their backs. There were some who remained quite immoveable, and were, perhaps, like me, engaged in making observations. I disdained, as I already knew them so well, all the tribes of other insects which were attracted to my strawberry-plant: such as the snails which nestled under its leaves; the butterflies which fluttered around it; the beetles which dug at its roots; the little worms which found the means of living in the cellular tissue, that is to say, simply in the thickness of a leaf; the wasps and the bees which hummed about its flowers; the aphis which sucked the stems, the ants which ate up the aphis; and last of all, the spiders which wove their webs near at hand in order to catch all these different victims."

He then had recourse to the microscope to examine into the world of the infinitely little, and saw that the only limit to his observation was the imperfections of our instruments; each leaf of the strawberry-plant was a little universe in which creatures invisible to the naked eye were born, lived, and died. This led to the reflection that his plant would be more densely peopled if it had not been in a pot, in the midst of the smoke of Paris; that, moreover, he had only made his observations of it at one hour of the day, and at one season of the year; and he perceived that the complete history of one species of plant, comprising its relations with the animal world, would be sufficient to occupy several naturalists. His thoughts turned to the immense number of plants and animals known to us, and to the small amount of attention which up to that time had been given to their instincts, their appearances, their friendships and enmities, so that almost everything remained still to be found out. He thought over the weakness of his intention, and acknowledged himself vanquished at the outset. Far from being able to embrace in his work this formidable mass of information which we call creation, he felt himself incapable of explaining fully even its details. "All my ideas," he wrote to Hennin, "are but the shadows of nature, collected by another shadow." He also compared himself to a child who has dug a hole in the sand with a shell, to contain the sea. So he gave up his project of writing a general history, and lowered his ambition till it was more in accordance with his powers, declaring himself satisfied that he had given his readers some new delights, and extended their views in the infinite and mysterious world of nature.

Nevertheless, if his work was given to the public only in a curtailed and mutilated form, his object remained. The Études de la Nature was destined to paraphrase the first part of FÉnÉlon's TraitÉ de l'existence de Dieu, especially of the second chapter, entitled "Proofs of the Existence of God, taken from the Consideration of the Chief Marvels of Nature." Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was born religious at heart in an age which had "lost the taste for God," to use Bossuet's expression, when believers themselves were wanting in spirit and tenderness. He was brought up upon the celebrated phrase of Voltaire—"The people must have a religion"—and never could reconcile himself to hear repeated around him that in truth, "Religion is the portion of the people, just a kind of political engine invented to keep them in check" (Études). Atheism seemed to him a diminution of our being, a lessening of its most noble sensations and its most elevated emotions. "It is only religion," he said, "which gives to our passions a lofty character"; and he related, apropos of this, that the day on which he himself had perceived most vividly the power of the "divine majesty" of suffering was in contemplating a peasant woman from Caux prostrated at the foot of the cross one stormy day, praying, with clasped hands, her eyes cast up to heaven, for a boat which was in danger. The seventeenth century would not have admitted for poetical reasons that they believed thus in God. Men's minds were then too serious; and the great spiritual directors of the time of Bossuet and Bourdaloue, without mentioning the Jansenists, would have been shocked at the sentimental religion of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. But the eighteenth century had taught men to be less nice, and such things appeared to it to be sublime.

It must be said that they were very tired of arguments and philosophy, and the idea that they might seek for truth by some less tiresome paths was very pleasing. They had for so long lived like the Carthusian friars of the Harmonies. "One day one of my friends went to visit a Carthusian friar. It was the month of May; the garden of the recluse was covered with flowers, in the borders and on the fruit-trees. As for him, he had shut himself up in his room, from which he could see absolutely nothing. 'Why,' asked my friend, 'have you closed your shutters?' 'In order,' replied the friar, 'to be able to meditate without distraction on the attributes of God.' 'Ah!' said my friend, 'don't you think that perhaps you may find greater distraction in your own heart than nature would give to you in the month of May? Take my advice, open your shutters and shut the door upon your imagination.'"

Open your shutters and shut your books, cried this new-comer in the world of letters. Nature is the source of everything which is ingenious, useful, pleasant and beautiful, but she must be contemplated in all simplicity of heart. It is for our happiness that she hides from us the laws which govern her mighty forces, and there is a kind of thoughtless impiety in wishing to penetrate too deeply into her mysteries. Besides, we always fail, and our imprudent efforts only succeed in adding the mist of our errors to the cloud which veils her divinity. Let us make up our minds to not being taken into the Divine confidence; content to examine Nature at work, observing her work without studying it on a system, forgetting what the scholars and the academies have decided and decreed as a matter of doctrine. The forces of Nature, ever young and active, form one of the most wonderful and admirable spectacles which the universe affords us. The same spirit of life which formed our world out of chaos, continues to develop the germs under our eyes, to repair the wounded plants and renew their injured tissues with fresh growths. They tell you that Nature brings forth at hazard, producing pell-mell and indifferently the good and the bad, annulling the good by this disorder. But I tell you that not a blade of grass has been made at hazard, and that the least mite testifies to the existence of a sovereign intelligence and goodness. I assure you also that this goodness has only had one pre-occupation—yourself; but one aim—your happiness. God made nature for man, and man for Himself. Man is the end and aim of everything upon the earth, and the proofs of this are infinite in number.

A great part of the Études is taken up with the gathering together of these proofs. I do not believe that there exists another so intrepid a partisan of final causes. Nothing turns him from his demonstration, not facts, nor absurdities, nor ridicule. Things are so because it is necessary to the happiness of man that they should be so: nothing turns Bernardin de Saint-Pierre from that opinion. I do not say that he scoffed at science; he looked upon himself as a scientific spirit who was to set his predecessors right, including Descartes and Newton; I only say that he speaks about it rather as though he were laughing at it.

Our earth, then, has been solidified, modelled and carved out by God for our needs and our comfort. There is not a mountain whose height, breadth, and site have not been calculated by Divine wisdom for our advantage. One is intended to refresh us with its ice, another to protect us from the north wind, a third to produce a healthful current of air; this last we call eolian. Those islands of rock strewn along the seashore, and vulgarly called sand-banks, are fortifications placed there by Providence, without which our coasts would be demolished by the ocean. Those which one remarks at the mouths of water-courses "form channels for the rivers, each channel taking a different direction, so that if one becomes stopped up by the winds or the currents from the sea, the water can escape by another." It speaks for itself that God does not have to try a thing over and over again before it is perfect. Creation was perfect from the first day, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre suppresses the slow evolutions, due to the action of the forces of nature, which according to some incessantly alter the surface of the earth. That surface is unchangeable. There is no example that the sea ever "hollowed out a bay, or detached anything from the continent;" that the "rivers formed at their entrance into the sea sand-banks and promontories;" that ancient ports had been effaced, islands destroyed, or mountains denuded and levelled to the ground. In truth, the works of God, like those of man, are subject to wear, and need reparation; but the Divine Architect is never idle, and works without ceasing to maintain them, which amounts to the same thing.

The means which He employs for reparation often escape our notice from their very simplicity. What pedestrian has not execrated the clouds of sand or dust which the wind raises on the strand or on barren plains. He would have been rather astonished if he had known that he was witnessing the dispersal of materials designed by Providence to replace the soil in the mountains, which had been worn away by water. Sand and dust are transported to the tops of the peaks upon the wings of storms, thanks to the "fossil attractions" of the mountains.

It was six years after Buffon's Époques de la Nature had appeared, that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre offered to the public this astonishing system of the Universe. It needed a certain amount of courage to be so deliberately behindhand.

The theory of final causes thus carried to extremes occasioned a good deal of embarrassment to the Deist. It is no slight matter to undertake to explain, to the advantage of Providence, everything that there is upon the earth without any exception; so many things appear useless, so many hurtful. Saint-Pierre never despaired of finding justification for every one of them, with human happiness as its basis. He went on bravely without disturbing himself that the laugh was at his expense, and with an ardour of conviction which convinced many of the men and almost all the women who read him. The spirit of that day was not very scientific.

Of what use are volcanoes? Hardly any one has failed to perceive that rivers are, so to speak, the drains of the continent. The oils, the resin, and the nitre of vegetables and animals are carried by the water-courses to the sea, where all their component parts become dissolved, covering the surface with fatty matter, which does not evaporate because it resists the action of the air. Without the intervention of Providence the entire ocean since the existence of the world would be defiled with these tainted oils; but Providence made volcanoes, and the waters were purified. In fact, volcanoes "do not proceed from heat inside the earth, but they owe their origin to the waters, and the matter contained in them. One can convince one's self of this fact by remarking that there is not a single volcano in the interior of a continent, unless it is in the neighbourhood of some great lake like that of Mexico." Nature, obeying a Divine impulse, has "lighted these vast furnaces on the shores of the ocean," so that the oils of which we have spoken, being attracted towards them by a phenomenon which the author does not explain, are burnt up as the weeds in a garden are burnt in the autumn by a careful gardener. One does in truth find lava in the interior of a country, but a proof that it owes its origin to water is that the volcanoes which have produced it have become extinct, when the waters have failed. Those volcanoes were lighted there like those of our day, by the animal and vegetable fermentations with which the earth was covered after the Deluge, when the remains of so many forests and so many animals, whose trunks and bones are still found in our quarries, floated on the surface of the ocean, forming huge deposits, which the currents accumulated in the cavities of the mountains, so that the ancient craters of the Auvergne mountains prove that all volcanoes are found beside the sea. Inundations afford us the pleasures of boating and fishing. That is the reason that the nations which inhabit the shores of the Amazon and the Orinico, and many other rivers which overflow their banks, looked upon these inundations as blessings from heaven before the arrival of Europeans, who upset their ideas: "Was it, then, so displeasing a spectacle for them to see their immense forests intersected by long water-roads, which they could navigate without trouble of any sort in their canoes, and of which they could gather in the produce with the greatest ease? Some colonies like those on the Orinico, convinced of these advantages, had adopted the strange habit of living in the tops of trees, like the birds, seeking board, lodging and shelter under their foliage. In spite of the epithet strange, one feels that he regretted these picturesque manners, and that it would not have displeased him at all to see the dwellers on the banks of the Loire, nesting with the magpies and jays in their own poplars."

Beasts of prey rid the earth of dead bodies, which without them would not fail to infect the air. Every year there dies a natural death at least the twentieth part of the quadrupeds, the tenth part of the birds, and an infinite number of insects, of which most of the species only live a year. There are some insects even who only live a few hours, such as the ephemera. This enormous destruction would soon poison the air and the water without the aid of the innumerable army of grave-diggers created and maintained by Nature to keep the surface of the globe clean. Saint-Pierre draws a description of it which is wonderful for its colour and spirit: "It is above all in hot countries, where the effects of decomposition are most rapid and most dangerous, that Nature has multiplied carnivorous animals. Tribes of lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, civet-cats, lynxes, jackals, hyenas, condors, &c., there come to reinforce the wolves, foxes, martens, otters, vultures, ravens, &c. Legions of voracious crabs make their homes in the sand there; alligators and crocodiles lie in ambush amongst their reeds, an innumerable species of shell-fish, armed with implements to enable them to suck, to bore, to file, to crush, bristle on the rocks and pave their sea-shores. Clouds of sea-birds fly screaming along the rocks, or sail round them on the tops of the waves seeking their prey; eels, garfish, shad, and every species of cartiaginous fish which only lives upon flesh, such as long sharks, big skate, hammer-fish, octopuses armed with suckers, and every variety of dog-fish, swim about in shoals, occupied all the time in devouring the remains of the dead bodies which collect there. Nature also musters insects to hasten on the destruction. Wasps armed with shears cut the flesh, flies pump out the fluids, marine worms separate the bones.... What remains of all these bodies, after having served as food to numberless shoals of other kinds of fish, some with snouts formed like a spoon, others like a pipe, so that they can pick up every crumb from the vast table, at last converted by so many digestions into oils and fats and added to the vegetable pulps which descends from all parts into the ocean, would reproduce a new chaos of putrefaction in its waters, if the currents did not carry it to the volcanoes, the fires of which succeed in decomposing it and giving it back to the elements. It is for this reason, as we have already indicated, that volcanoes ... are all in the neighbourhood of the sea or big lakes."

How happy are the poets! for they can talk nonsense with impunity. With all his extravagant ideas, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has brought home to us like no one else, the sensation of the activity of Nature, and of the swarming life which covers the earth, moves inside it, and fills the air and the sea.

He had quite foreseen that people would oppose to all this the sufferings inflicted by beasts of prey, large and small, upon living animals, men even, but this objection did not embarrass him in the least. As far as animals are concerned, it would disappear of itself only by taking a broader view of things. "It is true," he said, "several species of carnivorous beasts devour living animals.... Let us return to the great principle of Nature: she has made nothing in vain. She destines few animals to die of old age, and I believe even that it is only man whom she permits to run through the entire course of life, because it is only man whose old age can be useful to his fellows. Among animals what would be the use of unreflecting old age to their posterity, which is born with the instinct which takes the place of experience? On the other hand, how would the decrepid parents find sustenance among their children who leave them the moment they know how to swim, fly, or walk? Old age would be for them a weight from which the wild beasts deliver them." Let us add that to them death means little suffering. They are generally destroyed in the night during their sleep. "They do not attach to this fatal moment any of the feelings which render it so bitter to the greater part of humanity—the regrets for the past and anxieties for the future. In the midst of a life of innocence, often with their dreams of love still fresh, their untroubled spirits wing their flight into the shades of night. It is very prettily phrased, but unhappily no one has ever succeeded, often as it has been tried, in convincing those who are eaten that it is for their good."

The objection relative to man is dismissed with the same ease. "Man has nothing to fear from beasts of prey. Firstly, most of them only go abroad in the night, and they possess striking characteristics which announce their approach even before they become visible. Some of them have strong odours of musk like the marten, the civet cat, and the crocodile; others shrill voices which can be heard for long distances in the night like the wolves and jackals; again, others have strongly-marked colours which can be distinguished a long way off upon the neutral tint of their skins: such are the dark stripes of the tiger and the distinct spots of the leopard. They all have eyes which shine in the darkness.... Even those which attack the human body have distinguishing signs; either they have a strong odour like the bug, or contrasts in colour to the parts to which they attach themselves, like white insects on the hair, or the blackness of fleas against the whiteness of the skin." How about fleas upon the negro?

The flea's usefulness does not stop with its blackness. It is also useful from the point of view of political economy, by obliging "the rich to employ those who are destitute, in the capacity of domestics, to keep things clean about them." Furthermore hail, with the help of its ally, the hurricane, destroys a great many insects; earthquakes are no less necessary and useful, their function being to purify the atmosphere. Hail, tempests, earthquakes, are in reality so many benefactors, unrecognised because we are not penetrated to the marrow of our bones with these fundamental truths: the happiness of man is the first law of the world; "nothing superfluous exists, only such things as are useful relatively to man."

Here are some more proofs which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre considers striking. Nature invented the hideous scorpion to be a salutary terror to us, to keep us away from damp, unhealthy places, its ordinary abode. She has given four teats to the cow, which only brings forth one calf at a time, and a dozen to the sow, which has to bring up as many as fifteen young ones, and this because mankind liking milk and pork, the cow had to be made to give us of "the superabundance of her milk, and the sow of that of her young."

What shall be said of the "royal foresight" of the Divinity when it wishes to act upon our hearts and prepare them to learn patience, or open them to gentle feelings? Every one of us has mourned a dog, and has asked himself why these faithful animals have so short a life. Listen to the answer. "If the death of the dog of the house reduces our children, whose companion and contemporary he has been, to despair, doubtless Nature wished to give them, through the loss of an animal so worthy of human affection, their first experience of the privations of which human life is full." The example of the melon and the pumpkin is still more characteristic. While most fruits are cultivated for the mouth of man, like cherries and plums, or for his hand like pears and apples, the melon much larger and divided into quarters, "seems intended to be eaten by the family." As for the enormous pumpkin, Nature intends that one should share it with one's neighbours; it is pre-eminently a sociable fruit.

In spite of all these benefits, we hear our impious race accusing Nature, and blaspheming Providence. We are angry against Heaven when we suffer, when this or that fails us, as though Providence could be at fault, and as though we were not ourselves the real authors of our woes. A little faith, a little confidence, and we should be comforted, but we do not possess it, and we rush to our ruin through ignorance and unbelief, just as it happened one day to some men who had landed upon a desert island where there were no cocoa-nut trees. Soon the sea "threw upon the strand several sprouting cocoa-nuts, as if Providence were eager to persuade them by this useful and agreeable present to remain upon the island and cultivate it." Notice that this was not brought about by any chance currents, because sea-currents are regular, and those which surrounded this island had had time since the creation of the world to sow it with all sorts of seeds. "However that may be, the emigrants planted the cocoa-nuts, and in the course of a year and a half they sent up shoots four feet in height. So marked a favour from Heaven was, nevertheless, not sufficient to keep them in this happy spot: a thoughtless desire to procure for themselves wives, induced them to leave it, and plunged them in a long series of misfortunes, which most of them could not survive. For my part, I do not doubt that if they had had that confidence in Providence which they owed to her, she would have sent wives to them in their desert island, as she had sent them cocoa-nuts."

Providence also takes touching care of the animals. The thorns of the brambles and bushes protect the little birds in their nests, and collect the sheep's wool to line the nests with. Ermines have the tips of their tails black, "so that these small animals, entirely white, when going after one another in the snow, where they leave hardly any footmarks, may recognise one another in the luminous reflections of the long nights of the North." Hairy animals are generally white underneath because white keeps them warmer than any other colour, and because "the stomach needs most heat on account of the digestive and other functions; on the other hand, the head is always the deepest in colour, above all in hot countries, because that part has most need of coolness in the animal economy." It is also for the last reason that several of the birds in hot regions have tufts and crests on their heads, to shade them. Lastly, all animals without exception find their table set for them ever since the world began, even those who only feed upon carrion. "Ancient trees grow in the depths of new forests to afford sustenance to the insects and birds who find it in their aged trunks. Corpses were created for the carnivorous animals. In every age there must come forth creatures young, old, living and dying." There is always an essential difference in the methods of Providence towards animals and towards man. God takes care of us for our own sakes, He only takes care of animals or plants as they affect us, and in such measure as they are useful or agreeable to us. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was never tired of making remarks in support of these diverse opinions, and we could multiply quotations indefinitely, but what has already been said gives an adequate idea of his theory of the universe.

At first sight we are inclined to shrug our shoulders and pity the final causes for having found an advocate capable of such sad nonsense; but on reflection we are obliged to admit that once the principle is conceded, there is no means of stopping one's self in the downward course. Why admit this final cause and reject that one? If the world is arranged for the happiness of man, ought we not to explain the utility of moths and weevils after that of wool and corn? And if we see in it, as Saint-Pierre did, a means of compelling the monopolists to sell their merchandise for fear that the poor would have to go naked or die of hunger, have we not the right to maintain that one argument is worth another, and that it would be difficult for you to find a better? On the whole, Bernardin only developed FÉnÉlon's idea, who also subordinated the creation to man, and was led by that, in spite of all his cleverness, to affirm that the stars were made to give us light; that the dog is born "to give us a pleasant picture of society, friendship, fidelity, and tender affection;" that wild beasts are intended "to exercise the courage, strength, and skill of mankind." Between FÉnÉlon and Saint-Pierre, as between all determined partisans of final causes, it is only a question of more or less ingenuity, and Saint-Pierre was very ingenious. Grimm wrote, "I do not believe that any man had as yet ventured to recognise Providence, or to attribute to it more skilful attention, more refined research, more delicacy of feeling; but his idea is carried beyond all bounds, and leads him occasionally into all kinds of nonsense and absurd puerilities. His book is one long collection of eclogues, hymns, and madrigals in honour of Providence."[20] The Études de la Nature makes us still better able to understand the warmth with which Buffon repudiated the theory of final causes.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre would have been immensely astonished if he had been told that he was labouring to prepare generations of pessimists by attributing to Providence the cares and solicitude of a nurse in its relations with men. Nothing was further from his thoughts, and yet nothing is more certain from the moment that his works became a success with the public, and exerted an influence over men's minds. Man once convinced that his happiness is the concern of God, considers it the duty of the Divinity to secure it. In misfortune he has no patience to bear his troubles, because he looks upon himself as injured by Providence. The horror of the injustice done to him redoubles his suffering, and he curses the Heaven which does not respect his rights. It would be doing too much honour to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre if we were to make him answerable for the gloomy and bitter turn of mind of our contemporaries, but he certainly helped it on, since for a thoughtful mind his philosophy has a fatal tendency to demonstrate the fallibility of Providence.

He perceived the difficulty quite well, and felt that it is not sufficient to keep repeating over and over again the axiom: "All is for the best in the best of worlds." When one has finished repeating it, the evil is not ended nor explained. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was only too glad to fall back upon his own century, on which he had turned his back during his religious exaltation, and to explain by reasons taken from Diderot and Jean-Jacques the sufferings of humanity in a world created perfect. So he wrote: "Man is born good; it is society that makes bad people, and your education which prepares them." Man is born good; take the savages, who alone upon the earth still possess "real virtue." A good man continues happy so long as he does not turn aside from "the law of nature." Take the savages again—their happiness is perfect, according to the missionaries, so long as they have no intercourse with civilised nations. Society "makes bad people" by its stupid and brutal laws, which ignore and defy those of nature and precipitate us into abysses of evil. Our education prepares our young people to be in their turn wicked, because it is founded upon the false idea with which our whole civilisation is impregnated: it develops the intelligence instead of developing the heart. Nature "does not wish man to be skilful and vainglorious; she wishes him to be happy and good." We are going against her intentions when we undertake to invent scientific systems which "deprave the heart," instead of cultivating sweet and tender sentiments amongst our children. In doing so we commit a criminal error every day of our lives, the fatal consequences of which are quite apparent. Consider what man has become under the influence of this civilisation of which we are so proud.

"Nature, which intended him to be loving, did not furnish him with arms, and so he forged them himself to fight his fellows with. She provides food and shelter for all her children; and the roads leading to our towns are only distinguishable from afar by their gibbets! The history of nature presents only benefits, that of man nothing but wrath and rapine." And further on: "There are many lands which have never been cultivated; but there are none known to Europeans which have not been stained with human blood. Even the lonely wastes of the sea swallow up in their depths shiploads of men sent to the bottom by their fellows. In the towns, flourishing as they seem with their arts and monuments, pride and cunning, superstition and impiety, violence and treachery wage their eternal strife and fill with trouble the lot of the unfortunate inhabitants. The more civilised the society there, the more cruel are its evils and the more they increase in number."

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had his Rousseau beside him, when he thus launched his anathemas against civilisation and the sciences. He occasionally makes use of expressions which closely recall the Discours sur les lettres, les sciences et les arts, and the Discours sur l'inegalitÉ parmi les hommes. Unhappily for his thesis, his eloquent rage against our social state rings false. We feel that it is a rhetorical artifice to help him out of the difficulty of his theory of final causes, and to open out a way for him to bring at last his character of legislator before the public. The occasion was unique for showing to France what she had lost through the incapacity of her ministers, who allowed the memorials of M. de Saint-Pierre to moulder in their portfolios. We thus return to Robinson Crusoe, the ideal colony, and those famous laws of nature which it is our mission to contrast with the laws made by man.

The laws of nature are "moral" and "sentimental" laws; they comprise in the first place all the good and noble sentiments which God has placed in our hearts. Just as reason is a miserable and inferior faculty, so sentiment is the glory and strength of mankind; man owes to it everything great and splendid which he has ever accomplished. "Reason has produced many men of mind in the so-called civilised ages, and sentiment men of genius in the so-called barbarous ages. Reason varies from age to age, sentiment is always the same. Errors of reason are local and transitory, the truths of sentiment are unchanging and universal. By reason the ego is made Greek, English, Turkish; by sentiment it becomes human, divine.... In truth, reason gives us some pleasures; but if it reveals some portion of the order of the universe, it shows us at the same time our own destruction, which is involved in the laws of its preservation. It shows us at once past ills and those that are to come.... The wider it explores it brings back to us the evidence of our nothingness; and far from calming our anxieties by its researches, it often only increases them by its knowledge. On the contrary sentiment, blind in its desires, surveys the relics of all countries and all times; it trusts in the midst of ruins, of battles, even of death, in some vague, eternal existence; in all its yearnings it strives after the attributes of the Divinity—infinity, scope, duration, power, greatness, and glory; it adds ardent desire to all our passions, gives to them a sublime impulse, and in subjugating our reason, becomes itself the noblest and best instinct of human life." We must correct Descartes and say: "I feel, therefore I exist."

The apotheosis of sentiment, "blind in its desires" and indomitable in their pursuit, which "subjugates our reason" and makes us act on impulse, strongly resembles an apotheosis of passion, and in fact has led to it. So George Sand strikes some roots in the insipid sensibility of the last century, but we know already that it was not within the scope of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to calculate the not very remote consequences of his principles. He dreamt, without the very least anxiety, of a world entirely governed by sentiment, and emancipated from that abominable reason. No danger could threaten this regenerated community, because its leader had sorted out the sentiments common to humanity, and only allowed such of them to prevail as pity, innocence, admiration, melancholy, and love. This choice promised to the world a succession of Idylls. As for the bad sentiments, hate, avarice, jealousy, ambition, there was no need to take them into consideration or to fear their usurpation; they would disappear from the face of France so soon as the plan of education placed at the end of the Études de la Nature had been adopted.

There is nothing like coming at the right time. At the beginning of the Revolution these sorts of things were listened to with a contrite spirit, and no one thought of laughing at them. Such sentiments appeared as wise as they were beautiful; no one doubted his own virtue and goodness, and all rejoiced in this picture of the delightful emotions which awaited the new society. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre laboured to draw seductive pictures of it, and his efforts have procured us some analyses of public feeling which their date render most interesting.

His chapter on Melancholy is one of the most interesting. Melancholy had only lately come into fashion, and he exerted himself to inquire into the source of this seductive sentiment, the sweetest and most cherished poison of the soul. He to some extent recognised the danger of it, for the word voluptuous occurs several times under his pen: "I do not know," he wrote, "to what physical law the philosopher may attribute the sensations of melancholy. For my part I think that they are the most voluptuous impressions of the soul." That is very finely expressed and very true. Further on, apropos of people who try by artificial means to give themselves sensations of melancholy, he writes: "Our voluptuaries have artificial ruins erected in their gardens.... The tomb has supplied to the poetry of Young and Gessner pictures full of charm; therefore our voluptuaries have imitation tombs put up in their gardens." He is himself "a voluptuary" when he solaces his woes, by abandoning himself to the melancholy which bad weather creates in him. "It seems to me at such times that nature conforms to my situation like a tender friend. She is, besides, always so interesting under whatever aspect she reveals herself, that when it rains I seem to see a beautiful woman in tears, all the more beautiful the more she is distressed. In order to experience these sentiments, which I dare to call voluptuous, we must have no plans for going out, or paying visits, or hunting, or travelling, which always put us into a bad temper, because we are thwarted; ... to enjoy bad weather it is necessary that our soul should travel, our body stay quiet."

We have in these lines a great science of melancholy, given to us by a refined "voluptuary" who understands how to give to agreeable sensations their maximum of enjoyment. One is quite taken in to find directly after a series of pretentious articles in the manner of the day, in which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre explains the pleasure of the grave by the sentiment of the immortality of the soul, and the pleasure of decay by that of the infinity of time. I notice in it, however, an effort to interest the reader in the real and native gothic ruins, which might be called daring, at that time of mania for filling one's garden with Greek and Roman erections, imitation temples, imitation tombs, imitation columns, and imitation ruins, ornamented with allegorical emblems and sentimental inscriptions. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre did not oppose this classical bric-À-brac which pleased him only too well, but he possessed to a greater extent than his contemporaries the sense of the picturesque, which bore fruit in some romantic scenes like the description of the ChÂteau of Lillebonne.

The chÂteau is perched on a height commanding a valley. "The high walls which surround it are rounded off at the corners, and so covered with ivy that there are but few points from which one can mark their course. About the middle of their length, where I should think it would not be easy to penetrate, rise high battlemented towers, upon the tops of which grow big trees, having the appearance of a thick head of hair. Here and there through the carpet of ivy which covers their sides, are gothic windows, embrasures and gaps resembling mouths of caverns, through which one can see the stairs. The only birds to be seen flying round this desolate habitation are buzzards, which hover about in silence; and if occasionally the cry of a bird is heard, it is sure to be an owl whose nest is there.... When I remember at sight of this stronghold, that it was formerly inhabited by petty tyrants who from there used to plunder their unlucky vassals and even travellers, I seem to see the carcass of some great beast of prey." This conclusion is from a man who, in default of an historical sense, has at least an historical imagination.

Love inspires him with a charming page on the expansion of every living thing during the love-season. The plant opens its flowers, the bird puts on his most beautiful plumage, the wild beasts fill the forests with their roaring, and the soul of the young man "receives its full expansion." His soul also opens its flowers and exhales its perfume of generosity, candour, heroism, and holy faith, and love adorns it with wondrous graces which take the form of "all the characteristics of virtue." It is a dazzling metamorphosis, and it is in some sort a disguise, for the virtues, which are only a transformation of love, run great danger of evaporating with the age of love, like the parade dress of certain birds in the Indies, which are only lent by nature during the pairing season. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre remarks that certainly young men have some modesty, and that "most of our old men have none at all, because they have lost the feeling of love." Honour to the sentiment which thus raises us above ourselves! It is a great thing to have felt certain things once in our lives.

Admiration is another of the moral laws by which nature, left to herself, governs the earth. The author adds to it the pleasures of ignorance, which he declares to be incomparable. Ignorance is the supreme blessing from Heaven, the masterpiece of nature, "the never-failing source of our pleasures." We owe to it the exquisite enjoyments of mystery. It takes away all our ills, and embellishes the good things of this life with illusion, upholds the poetry of the world against science. "It is science which has hurled the chaste Diana from her nocturnal chariot; has banished the wood-nymphs from our ancient forests and the sweet naiads from our fountains. Ignorance invited the gods to share in its joys, its sorrows, its hymeneal festivities, and its funeral rites: science sees nothing there but the elements. It has abandoned man to man, and thrown him upon the earth as into a desert." Every epoch which repudiates the supernatural will recognize itself in this man abandoned to man, and feeling that he is in a desert.

It would have been best to stop there, glorifying ignorance on poetical grounds only. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre spoilt everything by insisting on the misdeeds of science. He wished to profit by the occasion to crush his enemies the Academicians, men with systems, who never appeared to take his theories seriously, and he gravely affirms that ignorance is the only preservative against the errors into which the "so-called human sciences" plunge us. When one knows nothing, one is sure to know no nonsense. Let it be said in passing that the scientific works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre confirm this maxim; for if he had not learnt geometry, he would not have said such absurd things as we shall see presently, and which covered him with ridicule in the eyes of the scholars of his day. But he did not think of himself in celebrating the advantages of perfect ignorance; in such a case one never does think of oneself.

After the preceding, one does not expect study to hold a great place in the plan of education which crowns the Études de la Nature, the object of which is to expel all evil sentiments from the hearts of the French people. To begin with, Saint-Pierre abolishes learning from the education of women, of whom he only purposes to make housekeepers and mistresses. Love is their only end upon earth, the sole reason of their existence, and experience has proved that learning does not help them in this: "Those who have been learned, have almost all been unhappy in love, from Sappho to Christina, Queen of Sweden." It is not with theology and philosophy that they gain a man's affection, it is by all their feminine seductions, and it is with cookery that they keep it. "A man does not like to find a rival or an instructor in his wife." A husband likes good pastry when he is well, and good herb-tea when he is ill. He likes his coffee to be good, preserves in which "the juice is as clear as the flash of a ruby," flowers preserved in sugar which "display more brilliant colours than the amethyst in the rocks of Golconda." He likes his dining-room to be well lighted, the fishing expedition well organized. Look at Cleopatra: it was with her talents as mistress of the house that she subjugated Antony, and made him forget "the virtuous Octavia, who was as beautiful as the Queen of Egypt, but who as a Roman dame had neglected all the homely womanly arts, to occupy herself with affairs of state." Let us beware of turning our daughters into Octavias. They are to have no books; the best are of no use to them. No theatres. Give them a dancing master, a singing master, let them learn needlework and the science of housekeeping; nothing more is necessary to a young girl in the interest of her own happiness. It is thus that united families are prepared, where contentment engenders goodness and makes virtue easy.[21]

Boys are to leave classical studies alone, as they only delay at a dead loss their entry into life. Seven years of humanities, two of philosophy, three of theology; twelve years of weariness, ambition, and self-conceit.... "I ask if, after going through that, a schoolboy, following the denominations of these same studies, is more human, more philosophical, and believes more in God than a good peasant who does not know how to read? Of what use is it all to most men?" A boy ought to have finished his studies and begun a trade at sixteen. Up to then he is to study according to a programme which has made good its way in the world since, and for which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre merits a second time the title of pioneer. These boys were to learn nothing but useful things—arithmetic, geometry, physics, mechanics, agriculture, the art of making bread and weaving cloth, how to build a house and decorate it. A very careful civil education. It is generally forgotten that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is the inventor of school-drill. It was one of his favourite ideas; he even wished the little school-boys to undertake the grand manoeuvres.

"During the summer, when the harvest is gathered in, towards the beginning of September, I should take them into the country in battalions, divided under several flags. I should give them a picture of war. I should let them sleep on the grass in the shadow of the woods, where they should prepare their food themselves, and learn to defend and attack a post, swim a river, exercise themselves in the use of firearms, and at the same time in manoeuvres taken from the tactics of the Greeks, who are our superiors in almost everything."

A little Greek and Latin they might learn during their last years at school, but taught "by use," without grammar; lessons learnt by heart, or written exercises; a little law, something of politics, some ideas upon the history of religion; but no abstract speculations or researches, even in science.

One did not expect to meet so utilitarian a Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. In a hundred years we have not got beyond him, and yet we know whether our generation prides itself upon its contempt of the schools or not. The wonder is that he found means to retain his Louis XVI. sentimentalism in spite of this overflow of practical ideas. He corrected with one stroke of his pen the dryness of his programme. Everything which was to be taught in his Écoles de la Patrie—orthography, ethics, arithmetic, baking—all, without exception, were to be "put into verse and set to music." Out of school-hours the pupils were to be commanded by "the sound of flutes, hautbois, and bagpipes." Here we find ourselves again in the land of Utopia, and we recognise our Bernardin.

The schemes of political and social reforms which fill the last two volumes of the Études de la Nature are full of this curious mixture of a practical mind with a romantic imagination. Saint-Pierre is a democrat, and rather an advanced one for the day for which he was writing. He works with all his might to disturb the existing state of things, and the end is always simply a dream. You have the impression that in his regenerated state the most serious questions would be "put into verse and set to music," like the course of geometry in his model school. He asks for the suppression of large estates and great capitalists, monopolies, privileged companies, the rights of taxation. He proposes several means of putting down the nobility, whose existence would not fail in the long run to bring about the downfall and ruin of the State. He demands energetically the confiscation of the property of the clergy for the good of the poor. He wishes to replace hospitals with home nursing, by which the families of the sick persons would benefit; to ameliorate prison regime and madhouses, to secure pensions to aged workmen, and to construct in Paris edifices large enough to admit of fÊtes for the people being held there. All at once he interrupts himself in these grave subjects to describe an Elysium of his invention, which will be like the visible epitome of the happy metamorphosis of France.

His Elysium is situated at Neuilly, in the island of the Grande-yatte, enlarged by the small arm of the Seine and a bit of the shore. It is encumbered with all that the eighteenth century could invent in the way of symbols, allegories, emblems, touching combinations, and instructive conjunctions. There are nothing but obelisques, peristyles, tombs, pyramids, temples, urns, altars, trophies, busts, bas-reliefs, medallions, statues, domes, columns and colonnades, epitaphs, mottoes, maxims, complicated bowers, and "enchanted groves." There is not an object of art in it which has not a moral signification; not a pebble or blade of grass which does not give the passer-by a lesson in virtue or gratitude. Thus, for example, upon a rock placed in the midst of a tuft of strawberry-plants from Chili, one reads these words:—

"I was unknown in Europe; but in such a year, such a one, born in such a place, transplanted me from the high mountains of Chili; and now I bear flowers and fruit in the pleasant climate of France."

Under a bas-relief of coloured marble, representing small children eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves, one would read this inscription:—

"We were exposed in the streets, to the dogs, to hunger and cold; such a one, from such a place, lodged us, clothed us, and gave us the milk refused to us by our mothers."

At the foot of a statue, in white marble, of a young and beautiful woman, seated, and wiping her eyes with symptoms of sadness and joy:—

"I was hateful in the sight of Heaven and before men; but, touched with repentance, I appeased Heaven with my tears; and I have repaired the evil which I did to men, by serving the sorrowful."

Not far from this repentant Magdalen, whose marble face expresses, according to the Æsthetics of the day, at one and the same time joy and sadness, some statues are erected to good housewives "who shall re-establish order in an untidy house," to widows who have not re-married on account of their children, and to women "who shall have attained to the most illustrious position through the very modesty of their virtues." Further on are the busts of inventors of useful instruments, ornamented with the objects which they have invented: "the representation of a stocking-frame and that of a silk-throwing mill." As for the inventor of gunpowder, if he is ever discovered, there is no place for him in the Elysium.

Further away still, a magnificent tomb, surrounded with tobacco-plants, is consecrated to Nicot, who imported tobacco into Europe. A tuft of Lucern-grass, from Media, "surrounds with its tendrils the monument dedicated to the memory of the unknown husbandman who was the first to sow seed on our stony hills, and to present to us pasturage which renews itself four times a year on spots which were barren." And so on for all travellers who have brought into the country useful or agreeable plants. Seeing an urn in the midst of a nasturtium bed, a pedestal among the potatoes, the people would think of their benefactors, and their hearts would be softened. They would leave the island Grande-yatte better men; easy, too, as to their future, for this sublime spot would make the fortune of Paris. This Elysium would attract a crowd of rich foreigners, anxious to "deserve well" of France, so as to obtain the honour of being buried in the pantheon of virtuous men.

In the eyes of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre this enormous toy-fair was nothing less than "the re-establishment of one of the laws of nature most important to a nation—I would say an inexhaustible perspective of the Infinite." In the same way the reforms which have just been expounded all have for their object "the application of the laws of nature to the evils of society," and for a result the cure of these ills by the return of the "harmonious laws of nature" and the "natural affections." Unhappily for France, Saint-Pierre was not the only man who knew what he meant when he talked this jargon, without sense to us. In 1784 there was a large number of persons who imagined that there was something in it, and that, in fact, nothing was simpler than to return to the "harmonious laws of nature." The Études de la Nature corresponded with a widely-diffused current of ideas, and that adds to their interest. They help to represent to us the condition of many minds at the beginning of the Revolution. At that time they thought to overthrow everything to the sound of the bagpipes, and they believed in the panacea of Elysiums.

We have sketched the general plan of the work; it now remains to point out some of the ideas "by the way," which are its chief riches. The author strongly suspected that he was never more interesting than when he gave loose rein to his pen, and he never refused himself a digression or fancy. "Descriptions, conjectures, insight, views, objections, doubts, and even my errors," he says in his "Plan of Work," "I collected them all." He did well; for it is when he wanders from the point and forgets his system that he is original and interesting.

In Art he could not disabuse his mind of the mania for moral effect; he does not even spare the landscape. "If one wishes to find a great deal of interest in a smiling and agreeable landscape, one must be able to see it through a great triumphal arch, ruined by time. On the contrary, a town full of Etruscan and Egyptian monuments looks much more antique when one sees it from under a green and flowery bower."

He is, however, much more realistic, and consequently more modern, than his description of his Elysium would lead one to suppose. He deserves to be pardoned his philosophical landscapes, because he was the first to say that there is nothing ugly in nature, one only needs to know how to look at it. Man disfigures it by his works, but that which he has not touched always retains its beauty. "The ugliest objects are agreeable when they are in the place where Nature put them." A crab or a monkey which appears to you hideous in a natural history collection, ceases to be so when you see it on the shore or in a virgin forest; they then form an integral part of the general beauty of the landscape.

The same with people. A fig for conventional types and mythological costumes! copy nature. Make real shoe-blacks with their blacking-boxes; real nuns with their mob-caps; real kitchens with the real milk-jug and saucepan. Make your great men look like other people, instead of representing them "like angel trumpeters at the day of judgment, hair flying, eyes wild, the muscles of the face convulsed, and their draperies floating about in the wind." "Those are," say the painters and sculptors, "expressions of genius. But men of genius and great men are not fools.... The coins of Virgil, Plato, Scipio, Epaminondas, and even of Alexander, represent them with a calm, tranquil air." Show us a real Cleopatra, not "an academical face without expression, a Sabine in stature, looking robust and full of health, her large eyes cast up to heaven, wearing around her big and massive arms a serpent coiled about them like a bracelet. No, make her as Plutarch shows her to us: 'Small, vivacious, sprightly, running about the streets of Alexandria at night disguised as a market-woman, and, concealed amongst some goods, being carried on Apollodore's shoulders to go and see Julius CÆsar.'"

In ethics Bernardin de Saint-Pierre warmly combats the theory of the influence of climate, race, soil, temperament and food upon the vicious or virtuous tendencies of men. It seemed to him absurd to say, like Montesquieu, that the mountain is republican, and the plain monarchic; that cold makes us conquerors, and heat slaves. That is only "a philosophical opinion ... refuted by all historical evidence."

He attacked with the same ardour the theory of heredity which has become so widespread in our day. "I myself ask where one has ever seen inclination to vice or virtue communicated through the blood?" History proves that that too is only "a philosophical opinion," and it is a good thing that it is so, for man would no longer be at liberty to choose between good and evil if these different doctrines were true.

It is curious to see the partisans of free-will preoccupying themselves, more than a hundred years ago, with the theory of heredity. It is a proof that ideas float about a long time in the air in the germ-stage before they come to maturity and are adopted into the general advance of thought. It would be as absurd to pretend that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had actually conceived the physiological law, whose consequences make him so indignant as to attribute the discoveries of Darwin to his grandfather Erasmus. It is none the less true that his generation had glimmering ideas of a number of questions which have become common-places in the second half of the nineteenth century.

With a little good will we find even in the Études de la Nature a kind of embryo of Hegel's theory of Contradictions. Contraries produce agreement, said Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. "I look upon this great truth as the key to the whole of philosophy. It has been as fruitful in discoveries as this other maxim: 'Nothing has been made in vain.'" He adds: "Every truth, except the truths of fact, is the result of two contrary ideas.... If men paid attention to this law, it would put an end to most of their mistakes and their disputes; for one may say that everything being compensated by contraries, every man who affirms a simple proposition is only half right, because the contrary proposition exists equally in nature."

We have already said that he had not been happy in the field of science. It would be doing him a service to pass over in silence this part of his work, but his shade would not forgive us. He attached an enormous importance to it, and only attributed to the spirit of routine and professional jealousy the obstinacy of the learned men in taking no notice of his two chief discoveries—the origin of tides, and the elongation of the poles. We will explain them briefly. It is picturesque science if ever anything was.

The poles, says Saint-Pierre, are covered with an immense cupola of ice, "according to the experience of sailors, and also of common sense. The cupola of the north pole is about two thousand leagues in diameter, and twenty-five in height. It is covered with icicles, which are about ten leagues high. The cupola of the south pole is larger still. Each one melts alternately during half the year, according as each hemisphere is in summer or winter. The two poles are thus 'the sources of the sea, as the snow mountains are the sources of the principal rivers.' From the sides of the poles escape currents which produce the great movements of the ocean. This granted, the flow of these currents takes its course to the middle channel of the Atlantic ocean, drawn towards the line by the diminution of waters which the sun evaporates there continually. Two contrary currents or collateral eddies are thus produced, which are in fact the tides."

Now imagine the terrestrial globe capped at the two poles with these formidable glaciers, beside which Mont Blanc is only a mole-hill. The globe is necessarily oval in form. "In truth some celebrated academicians have laid down as a principle that the earth is flattened at the poles."[22] According to them "the curve of the earth is more sudden towards the equator in the sense north and south, because the degrees are there smaller; and the earth, on the contrary, is flatter towards the poles because the degrees are larger there."

Note that it is not only "celebrated academicians," but all the astronomers, all the geographers, every one having some notions of geometry, who conclude, from the increase in length of the degrees of the equator, that the earth is flat at the poles. But from these same measurements, of which he does not dispute the accuracy, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre draws an absolutely contrary conclusion. Here is an abridgment of his demonstration. "If one placed a degree of the meridian of the polar circle upon a degree of the same meridian at the equator, the first degree would exceed the second according to the experiments of the academicians. Consequently if one placed the whole arc of the meridian which crowns the polar circle, and which is forty-seven degrees, upon an arc forty-seven degrees of the same meridian near the equator, it would produce a considerable enlargement there, because its degrees are larger.... As the degrees of the polar curve are, on the contrary, larger than those of an arc of the circle, the entire curve must be as extensive as an arc of the circle; now it cannot be more extensive than by supposing it more enlarged and circumscribed at this arc; consequently the polar curve forms an elongated ellipsis."

If there happens to be amongst my readers a graduate of science, the defects of this reasoning must be obvious to him. Saint-Pierre implicitly believes that the two verticals whose angle forms a degree meet in the centre of the earth, which would be true if the earth was a perfect sphere, but which is not so at all if it is flat at the poles, as all the world admits it to be, or if it is elongated, as he maintains. He was apparently unaware that the curve of a contour at a certain point is defined according to the radius of the circle of curvature at that point, and that the curve is greater than the radius, and consequently the degree of the circle of curvature is smaller. The smallness of the degrees at the equator is, then, a proof that the curve is larger there, or, what comes to the same thing, that the earth is flat at the poles. His strange mistake proves that his scientific equipment was limited to the most elementary knowledge of geometry, which makes his audacity in continually going to war against "the celebrated academicians," against Newton, and every scholar whose works thwarted his poetical ideas about the universe, very characteristic. It is the indication of a strong dash of infatuation, to which is joined an equally large dash of obstinacy. He never admits that he might have been mistaken. He fought all his life for his theory about the tides and his elongation of the poles. He judged of men by their manner of speaking of it, or being silent; it was for him the touchstone of character no less than of the intelligence. Whosoever expressed an objection to it was an ignoramus or a fool, if he was not malicious. Whosoever said nothing was a vulgar pedant, an abject flatterer, one of those servile creatures who "only flatter accredited systems by which one gains pensions." (Letter to Duval, December 23, 1785.) All the French scholars had the misfortune to place themselves in one of these positions, and many sharp words were the consequence.

Bernardin is not the first nor the last writer who has mistaken his real vocation. His was neither science, nor philosophy, nor teaching. It was the love of the fields, the profound feeling and passion for this living and changing spectacle which we call a landscape. The design of his work impelled him to abandon himself to his adoration. He lost himself in it, and the result was a book which, when it appeared, was unique. From end to end it is nothing but descriptions; of the tropics, of Russia, of the Island of Malta, of Normandy, and of the environs of Paris. His travels had taught him to observe. The hurricane in the Indian Ocean, and the aurora borealis of Finland had made him more sensitive than ever to the sweetness of French scenery, to the charm of a bit of meadow, or a hedge in flower. He is, besides, much more sure of himself than in the beginning, much more capable of depicting whatever struck his fancy. His powers did not betray him any more as they had done in the Voyage to the Isle of France. There is an end of general descriptions and abstract epithets; at the first glance we are made to distinguish the characteristic of each tree, each tuft of grass, the colour of every stone, and of merging those particular and manifold impressions in a general impression. Here, for example, is a scene in Normandy, taken from the first Étude, into which enter only "localities, animals, and vegetables of the commonest kind in our climate." It has all the air of having been destined by the author to instruct those persons who do not admire anything less than the Bay of Naples. In any case it was a revelation in the way of a landscape, taken no matter whence, and of the colours which the French language even then offered to its painters in prose and verse.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre supposes himself to be upon "the most barren spot, a rock at the mouth of a river," and to be at liberty to ornament it with plants suitable to such a soil. These plants spring to life under his pen, and one sees them overrun this miserable corner of earth until its bareness disappears under a glorious mantle of vegetation in all sorts of brilliant and soft tints. "That on the side towards the sea the waves shall cover with foam, its rocks clad with wrack, fucus, and seaweed of all colours and all forms—green, brown, purple, in tufts and garlands, as I have seen it in Normandy, on crags of marl, detached from its cliffs by the sea; then on the side towards the river one shall see on the yellow sand, fine turf mixed with clover, and here and there some tufts of marine wormwood. Let us plant there some willows, not like those of our meadows, but with their natural growth—let us not forget the harmony of the different ages—that we may have some of these willows smooth and succulent, shooting their young branches into the air, and others very old, whose drooping branches form cavernous bowers; let us add to these their auxiliary plants, such as green mosses and golden-tinted lichens, which variegate their grey bark, and a few of those convolvuli called lady's smocks, which like to climb round the trunk and adorn the branches that have no apparent flowers with their heart-shaped leaves and bell-shaped flowers, white as snow. Let us also place there the animal life natural to the willow and its plants—the flies, beetles, and other insects, with the winged creatures who do battle with them, such as the aquatic dragon-flies, gleaming like burnished steel, who catch them in the air, the water-wagtails who, with their tails cocked, pursue them to earth, and the kingfishers who lie in wait for them at the water's edge."

Here we have the rock quite covered with a thousand different tints, and yet remark that Saint-Pierre has only given us one kind of tree. Let us finish the picture. "Contrast with the willow the alder, which like it grows on the banks of rivers, and which by its form, resembling a turret, its broad leaves, its dusky green colour, its fleshy roots, like cords running along the banks and binding up the soil, differs in every way from the thick mass, the light-green foliage, grey underneath, and the taproots of the willow; add to this the plants of different ages which cling to the alder, like so many odalisques of greenery, with their parasites, such as the maidenhair fern, shining out like a star on its humid trunk, the long hart's-tongue fern hanging down from its branches, and the other accessories of insects, birds, and even quadrupeds, which probably contrast in form, in colour, in manner and instincts with those of the willow."

The picture is now complete as regards form and colour, but how much is wanting to it still! First of all the flash of light. We light up our rock with the "first flush of dawn," and we see at the same time strong shadows and transparent ones thrown upon the grass, and dark and silvery green shades flung upon the blue of the heavens, and reflected in the water. Now we will put life into it. "Let us imagine here what neither painting nor poetry can render—the odour of the herbs, even that of the sea, the trembling of the leaves, the humming of the insects, the morning song of the birds, the rumbling, hollow murmurs, alternated with the silence of the billows which break on the shore, and the repetitions that the echoes make of all these sounds in the distance, as they lose themselves in the sea and seem like the voices of the nereids." Now it is finished, and if you do not breathe the salt air, do not feel yourself surrounded by the universal life, before this medley of changing colours and variable forms, this rustling, murmuring, roaring, it must be that the feeling for nature is not awakened in you—you are before Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's day, and the nineteenth century has passed in vain for you.

Perhaps we see better still the indefatigable activity of nature in the Jardin abandonnÉ. It is a French garden, with straight, trimmed walks, symmetrical flower-beds, regular fountains, and mythological statues. A country house stands in the midst of it. The hand of man has been withdrawn from this place, once so well cared for, and it becomes what the general life of earth chooses to make of it. It is soon done. "The ponds become swamps; the hedges of yoke-elm look ragged; all the arbours are choked up, and all the avenues overgrown. The vegetation natural to the soil declares war against the foreign vegetation; the starry thistles, and the vigorous mullein choke the English turf with their large leaves; thick masses of coarse grass and clover crowd round the judas trees; dog rose-briers climb upon them with their thorny brambles, as though they were going to take them by assault; tufts of nettles take possession of the naiad's urn, and forests of reeds the Vulcan's forges; greenish patches of moss cover the faces of the Venuses, without respect for their beauty. Even the trees besiege the house; wild cherry trees, elms, and maples rise to the roof, thrusting their long taproots into its raised parapet, finally taking command of its proud cupolas." In the eyes of a passer-by this is merely a ruin; in Bernardin's it is the re-establishment of order and beauty. Man appears to him nowhere so mischievous as when he alters the landscape.

His descriptions of foreign countries had a very great success and a great influence. As his first book was not much read, it is through the second that he has been the father of exoticism in French literature. Chateaubriand found his path prepared when he wrote Atala. Another had already revealed the virgin forest, dazzled the eyes with tropical colouring, and amused the mind with strange types and costumes. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre carried the taste for exoticism to childishness, as we do in our day, and he it was who invented exhibitions of savages and semi-savages. He dreamed of drawing to Paris Indians with their canoes, caravans of Arabs mounted on camels and bullocks, Laplanders in their reindeer sledges, Africans and Asiatics. "What a delight for us," he said, "to take part in their joy, to see their dances in our public squares, and to hear the drums of the Tartars, and the ivory horns of the negroes, resounding around the statues of our kings."

To sum up, the Études de la Nature is a beautiful prose poem upon a bad philosophical thesis. In Bernardin de Saint-Pierre Providence had a compromising advocate, which happens, however, pretty often. Not content with dragging the final causes into everything, he gave them such a royal following of false ideas and scientific errors, that the reading of his book becomes in places irksome. In order to find pleasure in it to-day we must follow his advice, throw away reason and give ourselves up entirely to feeling. In such a case it is impossible not to be touched with this effort to recall man to the thought of the Infinite, or not to let oneself be seduced by the charm of the advocate. As soon as we have given up disputing with the author on fundamental grounds, we are filled with pleasure at his sincere enthusiasm, the wealth of his sensations and their quite modern subtilty. He is himself as though intoxicated by the vividness of his impressions. By the strength of his love for nature he confounds it with the Divinity, and adores the works instead of the Author of them. He speaks of nature with a tenderness which communicates itself to his writing and wins over his reader. He wished to re-open the door to Providence, he re-opened it to the great god Pan; a result which was not worth the other, no doubt, but which has had immense consequences in our century.