The life of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is so unusual, so interesting, so suggestive and amusing, that the grumpiest of Anglo-Saxons need not complain of the fact that no series of Great French Writers would be complete which did not contain the name of the author of "Paul and Virginia." Even "Shakespeare's heirs" must accept the judgment of other nations about their own authors. Our duty is to comprehend a verdict we are powerless to upset. Dorian women, as Gorgo says in the famous ode of Theocritus, have a right to chatter in a Dorian accent, and a great French writer is not necessarily the worse for a strong infusion of French sentiment.

Saint-Pierre was no ordinary person, either as man or author. His was a strong and original character, more bent on action than on literature. Though a master of style and a great painter in words, he was ever a preacher, a sermonneur, as Sainte-Beuve calls him. His masterpiece—as the French reckon "Paul and Virginia" to be—came by chance, and is but a chapter in a huge treatise, a parable told by the way in a voluminous gospel. It is as if Ruskin's chef d'oeuvre were a novelette, or as if Carlyle's story had been a perfect whole, instead of a fragment and a failure.

To understand "Paul and Virginia" aright, one should read the "Études de la Nature," first published in 1784. Our grandparents read them greedily enough, either in the original or in the excellent translation of Dr. Henry Hunter, the accomplished minister of the Scots Church, London Wall. A hundred years have, however, pressed heavily upon these Studies, but to this day a tender grace clings to them. Even so will our own descendants in 1984 turn the pages of Ruskin and inhale a stray whiff of the breath which once animated a generation.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was as obstinate a theorist as ever lived, and his theory was that Providence had fashioned the whole world with one intent only, namely, the happiness of man. That man was not happy, Saint-Pierre sorrowfully admitted; but there was no reason whatever, save his own folly, why he should not be as happy as the days were long. Nothing could shake this faith of Saint-Pierre's. The terrible catastrophes of life—plague, pestilence, and famine, earthquakes and shipwreck—counted with him as nothing. That sombre view of human affairs which so oppressed with gloom the great mind of Bishop Butler, and drove the lighter but humaner spirit of Voltaire into a revolt half desperate, half humorous, never affected the imagination of Saint-Pierre, who none the less had a tender heart, had travelled far by land and sea, and often had laid down his head to rest with the poor and the miserable.

Walking once in the fertile district of Caux, he has described how he saw something red running across the fields at some distance, and making towards the great road. "I quickened my pace and got up in time enough to see that they were two little girls in red jackets and wooden shoes, who, with much difficulty, were scrambling through the ditch which bounded the road. The tallest, who might be about six or seven years old, was crying bitterly. 'Child,' said I to her, 'what makes you cry, and whither are you going at so early an hour?' 'Sir,' replied she, 'my poor mother is very ill. There is not a mess of broth to be had in all our parish. We are going to that church in the bottom to see if the CurÉ can find us some. I am crying because my little sister is not able to walk any farther.' As she spoke, she wiped her eyes with a bit of canvas which served her for a petticoat. On her raising up the rag to her face, I could perceive she had not the semblance of a shift. The abject misery of the children, so poor in the midst of plains so fruitful, wrung my heart. The relief which I could administer them was small indeed. I myself was then on my way to see misery in other forms."

These woebegone little figures scrambling across a great French ditch in search of broth attest the tenderness of Saint-Pierre's heart, whose descriptions are free from all taint of affectation and insincerity. He has neither the leer of Sterne nor the affected stare of Chateaubriand. He had, however, a theory which was proof against all sights and sounds. The great earthquake of Lisbon is reported to have made many atheists, and certainly no event of the kind has ever so seized hold of men's imaginations. Saint-Pierre brushes it contemptuously on one side. Says he in his Seventh Study: "The inhabitants of Lisbon know well that their city has been several times shattered by shocks of this kind, and that it is imprudent to build in stone. To persons who can submit to live in a house of wood, earthquakes have nothing formidable. Naples and Portici are perfectly acquainted with the fate of Herculaneum. After all, earthquakes are not universal; they are local and periodical. Pliny has observed," etc.

And so he works his way through the long list of human miseries. Tigers, indeed! Who need care for tigers? Have they not dusky stripes perceptible a great way off on the yellow ground of their skin? Do not their eyes sparkle in the dark? How easy to avoid a tiger! With all the enthusiasm of a theorist, he heaps up his authorities for statements great and small, and levels his quotations from all and sundry at his reader's head, much after the fashion of Mr. Buckle. Of a truly scientific spirit these Studies have not a trace, but they contain much attractive and delightful writing, and, though dominated by a fantastic and provoking theory, are full of shrewdness and wisdom as well as of lofty eloquence.

Thus, whilst combating what he conceives to be the error of supposing that morality is determined by climate, he points out that there is as much difference in manners, in opinions, in habiliments, and even in physiognomy, between a French opera actor and a Capuchin friar as there is between a Swede and a Chinese, and concludes by observing: "It is not climate which regulates the morality of man; it is opinion, it is education, and such is their power that they triumph not only over latitudes, but even over temperament."

Saint-Pierre's views on governments and supreme authority are worth reading, even after a course of Bodin or Hobbes. He says in the same Seventh Study:—

"Without paying regard to the common division of governments into democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, which are only at bottom political forms that determine nothing as to either their happiness or their power, we shall insist only on their moral constitution. Every government of whatever description is internally happy and respectable abroad when it bestows on all its subjects their natural right of acquiring fortune and honors, and the contrary takes place when it reserves to a particular class of citizens the benefits which ought to be common to all. It is not sufficient to prescribe limits to the people, and to restrain them within those limits by terrifying phantoms. They quickly force the person who puts them in motion to tremble more than themselves. When human policy locks the chain round the ankle of a slave, Divine Justice rivets the other end round the neck of the tyrant."

Nor is there much amiss with Saint-Pierre's political economy.

"It has always appeared to me strangely unaccountable that in France, where there are such numerous and such judicious establishments, we should have ministers of superintendence in foreign affairs, for war, the marine, finance, commerce, manufactures, the clergy, public buildings, horsemanship, and so on, but never one for agriculture. It proceeds, I am afraid, from the contempt in which the peasantry are held. All men, however, are sureties for each other, and, independently of the uniform stature and configuration of the human race, I would exact no other proof that all spring from one and the same original. It is from the puddle by the side of the poor man's hovel which has been robbed of the little brook whose stream sweetened it the epidemic plague shall issue forth to devour the lordly inhabitants of the neighboring castle."

But I must stop my quotations, which have been made only because by their means better than by any other the English reader can be made to perceive the manner of man the author of "Paul and Virginia" was, and how it came about that he should write such a book. Saint-Pierre was a missionary. He longed to convince the whole world that he was right, and to win them over to his side and make them see eye to eye with him. Hence his fervor and his force. He had not the genius of Rousseau, with whom he had some odd conversations, but by virtue of his wondrous sincerity he has an effectiveness which vies with the charm of the elder and greater writer. There is an air of good faith about Saint-Pierre. Though he deliberately sets to work and manufactures descriptions, he seems to do so with as much honesty of purpose and of detail as Gilbert White made his famous jottings in the parsonage of Selborne.

Of "Paul and Virginia" little need be said. It is a French classic, by the same title as "Robinson Crusoe" is a British one. Defoe has made English boys by the thousand want to be shipwrecked, and Saint-Pierre has made French boys by the thousand want to cry. The position of "Paul and Virginia" in French literature is attested in a score of ways. Editions abound both for the rich and for the poor. It is everywhere, in every bookshop and on every bookstall. The author of "Mademoiselle de Maupin" has left it on record that "Paul and Virginia" made his youthful soul burn within him, and he solemnly pronounces it a dangerous book. That Theophile Gautier was an expert in such matters cannot be disputed. His evidence, therefore, must be admitted, though as expert evidence it may be criticised. Sainte-Beuve is unfailing in praise of "Paul and Virginia." He discerns in it the notes of reality and freshness, the dew of youth is upon it,—it is sweet and comely. "What will ever distinguish this graceful pastoral is its truth, its humane and tender reality. The graces and sports of childhood are not followed by an ideal and mythical youth. From the moment when Virginia is agitated by an unknown trouble, and her beautiful blue eyes are rimmed with black, we are in the midst of genuine passion, and this charming little book, which Fontanes with an almost stupid superficiality judgment placed between 'Telemachus' and the 'Death of Abel,' I should myself classify between 'Daphnis and Chloe' and the immortal Fourth Book in honor of Dido. A quite Virgilian genius breathes through it."

That arch-sentimentalist, Napoleon Bonaparte, kept "Paul et Virginie" under his pillow during his Italian campaign; so at least he assured Saint-Pierre, but as he is known to have made precisely the same remark to Tom Paine about the "Rights of Man," he must not be understood au pied de la lettre. He is known to have read the book over again in the last sad days at Saint Helena, and no one can doubt that it was much to his taste.

I cannot disguise from myself—I wish I could—my own dislike of the book. We may, many of us, be disposed to believe, with Lord Palmerston, that all babies are born good; but we feel tolerably certain that no babies, if left to themselves, would grow up like Paul and Virginia. What is more, we would not wish them to do so. To tell the truth, we cannot weep over Virginia. A young woman who chooses to drown in sight of land and her lover, with strong arms ready to save her, rather than disarrange her clothing, makes us contemptuously angry. Bashfulness is not modesty, nor can it be necessary to die under circumstances which might possibly render a blush becoming. But the French cannot be got to see this, and "Paul et Virginie" was written for the French, to whom the spectacle of the drowning Virginia "one hand upon her clothing, the other on her heart," has long seemed sublime,—a human sacrifice to la pudeur. "And we also," exclaims one fervent spirit, "had we been on that fatal strand, should have cried to Virginia, 'Let yourself be saved! Quit your clothing, forget an instant the scruples of modesty. Live!' Do we not hear, however, in despite of our pity, a voice severer and more delicate than the cries of all these spectators moved by so many dangers and so much courage. Virginia cannot with the pure and innocent heart which God has given her, with the chaste love she has for Paul,—Virginia cannot throw off her garments and let herself be saved by this sailor. Let her die, therefore, that she may remain as pure as her soul! Let her die, since she has known how to distinguish, amidst the howling of the tempest and the cries of the spectators, the gentle but powerful voice of modesty."

It is interesting after this explosion of French feeling to call to mind Carlyle's remarks about "Paul and Virginia" in the second book of his prose poem, "The French Revolution."

"Still more significant are two books produced on the eve of the ever-memorable explosion itself, and read eagerly by all the world,—Saint-Pierre's 'Paul et Virginie' and Louvet's 'Chevalier de Faublas,'—noteworthy books, which may be considered as the last speech of old Feudal France. In the first there rises melodiously, as it were, the wail of a moribund world. Everywhere wholesome Nature is in unequal conflict with diseased perfidious Art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea. Ruin and Death must strike down the loved one, and what is most significant of all, death even here not by necessity, but by etiquette. What a world of prurient corruption lies visible in that super-sublime of modesty! Yet on the whole our good Saint-Pierre is musical, poetical, though most morbid. We will call his book the swan-song of old dying France."

So far Carlyle, who was a sentimentalist at heart.

It is noticeable, however, that M. Barine, whose biography of Saint-Pierre is here introduced to the English reader, and who, I have no doubt, represents modern criticism, lays no stress upon the death of Virginia, observing, with much composure, "The shipwreck of the 'Saint Geran' and the death of Virginia, which made us all shed floods of tears when we were children, are, it must be allowed, somewhat melodramatic, and, from a literary point of view, very inferior to the passionate scenes" (p. 173). It is as a love-story glowing and fervent, full of the unrestfulness and tumult which are the harbingers of passion in virgin breasts, that "Paul et Virginie" must now be regarded. So M. Barine says, and he is undoubtedly right; and the English reader, however much his moral sense rejects the climax of the tale, must be dull of heart who does not recognize, even though he fail to admire, the power which depicts the woful plight of poor Virginia when she becomes Love's thrall.

The pages of "Paul et Virginie" are frequently enlivened by aphorism and ennobled by description. One of its sayings is quoted with great effect by Sainte-Beuve in his "Causerie" on Cowper: "Il y a de plus dans la femme une gaietÉ lÉgÈre qui dissipe la tristesse de l'homme." In the same way there is a certain quality in the writings of Saint-Pierre, perceptible even to the foreigner, which renders acquiescence in the judgment of France upon his fame as a writer easier than might have been expected.

A. B.

BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE.