  PRINCIPALLY known as the author of the most charming of all idyllic romances—Paul et Virginie. Beginning his career as civil engineer he afterwards entered the French army. A quarrel with his official superiors forced him to seek employment elsewhere, and he found it in the Russian service, where his scientific ability received due recognition. Encouraged by the esteem in which he was held, he formed the project of establishing a colony on the Caspian shores, which should be under just and equal laws. St. Pierre submitted the scheme to the Russian Minister, who, as we should be apt to presume, did not receive it too favourably. He then went to Poland in the vain expectation of aiding the people of that hopelessly distracted country in throwing off the foreigners’ yoke. Failing in this undertaking, and despairing, for the time, of the cause of freedom, we next find him in Berlin and in Vienna. He had also previously visited Holland, in which great refuge of freedom he had been received with hospitality. In Paris, upon his return to France, his project of a free colony found better reception than in St. Petersburg—owing, perhaps, to the not altogether disinterested sympathy of the Government with the recently revolted American colonies. To further his plans he accepted an official post in the Ile de France, intending eventually to proceed to Madagascar, where was to be realised his long-cherished idea. On the voyage he discovered that his associates had formed a very different design from his own—to engage in the slave traffic. Separating from these nefarious speculators, he landed in the Ile de France, where he remained two years. It is to the experiences of this part of his life that we owe his Paul et Virginie, the scenes of which are laid in that tropical island. Returning home once again, he made the acquaintance of D’Alembert and of other leading men of letters in Paris, and, particularly, of Rousseau, his philosophical master. At the period of the Great Revolution of 1789, St. Pierre lost his post as superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens under the old Bourbon Government, and he found himself reduced to poverty; and although his sympathies were with the party of constitutional, though not of radical, reform, the supremacy of the extreme revolutionists (1792–1794) exposed him to some hazard by reason of his known deistic convictions. Upon the establishment of the reactionary revolution of the Empire, St. Pierre recovered his former post, and, with the empty honour of the Imperial Cross, he received the more solid benefit of a pension and other emoluments. His writings have been collected and published in two quarto volumes (Paris, 1836). Of these, after his celebrated romance, perhaps the most popular is La ChaumiÈre Indienne (“The Indian or Hindu Cottage”). His principal productions are Etudes de la Nature (“Studies of Nature”), Voeux d’un Solitaire (“Aspirations of a Recluse”), Voyage À L’Ile de France (“Voyage to Mauritius”), and L’Arcadie (“Arcadia”). His merits consist in a certain refinement of feeling, in charming eloquence in description of natural beauty, and in the humane spirit which breathes in his writings. Of the Paul et Virginie he tells us— “I have proposed to myself great designs in that little work.... I have desired to reunite to the beauty of Nature, as seen in the tropics, the moral beauty of a small society of human beings. I proposed to myself thereby to demonstrate several great truths; amongst others this—that our happiness consists in living according to Nature and Virtue.” He assures us that the principal characters and events he describes are by no means only the imaginings of romance. In truth, it seems difficult to believe that the genius of the author alone could have impressed so wonderful an air of reality upon merely fictitious scenes. The popularity of the story was secured at once in the author’s own country, and it rapidly spread throughout Europe. Paul et Virginie was successively translated into English, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. It became the fashion for mothers to give to their children the names of its hero and heroine, and well would it have been had they also adopted for them that method of innocent living which is the real, if too generally unrecognised, secret of the fascinating power of the book. It is thus that he eloquently calls to remembrance the natural feasts of his young heroine and hero:— “Amiable children! thus in innocence did you pass your first days. How often in this spot have your mothers, pressing you in their arms, thanked Heaven for the consolation you were preparing for them in their old age, and for the happiness of seeing you enter upon life under so happy auguries! How often, under the shadow of these rocks, have I shared, with them, your out-door repasts which had cost no animals their lives. Gourds full of milk, of newly-laid eggs, of rice cakes upon banana leaves, baskets laden with potatoes, with mangoes, with oranges, with pomegranates, with bananas, with dates, with ananas, offered at once the most wholesome meats, the most beautiful colours, and the most agreeable juices. The conversation was as refined and gentle as their food.” The humaneness of their manners had attracted to the charming arbour, which they had formed for themselves, all kinds of beautiful birds, who sought there their daily meals and the caresses of their human protectors. Our readers will not be displeased to be reminded of this charming scene:— “Virginie loved to repose upon the slope of this fountain, which was decorated with a pomp at once magnificent and wild. Often would she come there to wash the household linen beneath the shade of two cocoa-nut trees. Sometimes she led her goats to feed in this place; and, while she was preparing cheese from their milk, she pleased herself in watching them as they browsed the herbage upon the precipitous sides of the rocks, and supported themselves in mid-air upon one of the jutting points as upon a pedestal. Paul, seeing that this spot was loved by Virginie, brought from the neighbouring forest the nests of all sorts of birds. The fathers and mothers of these birds followed their little ones, and came and established themselves in this new colony. Virginie would distribute to them from time to time grains of rice, maize, and millet. As soon as she appeared, the blackbirds, the bengalis, whose flight is so gentle, the cardinals, whose plumage is of the colour of fire, quitted their bushes; parroquets, green as emerald, descended from the neighbouring lianas, partridges ran along under the grass—all advanced pell-mell up to her feet like domestic hens. Paul and she delighted themselves with their transports of joy, with their eager appetites, and with their loves.” In his views upon national education, St. Pierre invites the serious attention of legislators and educators to the importance of accustoming the young to the nourishment prescribed by Nature:— “They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children to the vegetable rÉgime. The peoples living upon vegetable foods, are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence, from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by his virtues; Archytas, by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh diet introduces many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon the beauty of the body and upon the tranquility of the mind. This regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life. “I have seen an instance of it in a young Englishman aged fifteen, and who did not appear to be twelve years of age. He was of a most interesting figure, of the most robust health, and of the most sweet disposition. He was accustomed to take very long walks. He was never put out of temper by any annoyance that might happen. His father, Mr. Pigott, told me that he had brought him up entirely upon the Pythagorean regimen, the good effects of which he had known by his own experience. He had formed the project of employing a part of his fortune, which was considerable, in establishing in English America a society of dietary reformers who should be engaged in educating, under the same regimen, the children of the colonists in all the arts which bear upon agriculture. Would that this educational scheme, worthy of the best and happiest times of Antiquity, might succeed! Physically, it suits a warlike people no less than an agricultural one. The Persian children, of the time of Cyrus, and by his orders, were nourished upon bread, water, and vegetables.... It was with these children, become men, that Cyrus made the conquest of Asia. I observe that Lycurgus introduced a great part of the physical and moral regimen of the Persian children into the education of those of the Lacedemonians.” (Etudes.) Of the many practical witnesses of this period, more or less interesting, for the sufficiency, or rather superiority, of the reformed regimen, four names stand out in prominent relief—Franklin, Howard, Swedenborg, Wesley—prominent either for scientific ability or for philanthropic zeal. To his early resolution to betake himself to frugal living, Benjamin Franklin, then in a printer’s office in Boston, attributes mainly his future success in life. It was to his pure dietary that the great Prison Reformer assigns his immunity, during so many years, from the deadly jail-fever, to the infection of which he fearlessly exposed himself in visiting those hotbeds of malaria—the filthy prisons of this country and of continental Europe. (See the correspondence of John Howard—passim.) Equally significant is the testimony of the eminent founder of Methodism whose almost unexampled energy and endurance, both of mind and body, during some fifty years of continuous persecution, both legal and popular, were supported (as he informs us in his Journals) mainly by abstinence from gross foods; while, in regard to Emanuel Swedenborg, if abstinence does not assume so prominent a place in his theological or other various writings as might have been expected from his special opinions, the cause of such silence must be referred not to personal addiction to an anti-spiritualistic nourishment (for he himself was notably frugal) but to preoccupation of mental faculties which seem to have been absorbed in the elaboration of his well-known spiritualistic system. The limits of this work do not permit us to quote all the many writers of the eighteenth century whom philosophy, science, or profounder feeling urged incidentally to question the necessity or to suspect the barbarism of the Slaughter-House. But there are two names, amongst the highest in the whole range of English philosophic literature, whose expression of opinion may seem to be peculiarly noteworthy—the author of the Wealth of Nations and the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “It may, indeed, be doubted [writes the founder of the science of Political Economy] whether butchers’ meat is anywhere a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil (where butter is not to be had), it is known from experience, can, without any butchers’ meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.” As for the reflections of the first of historians, who seems always carefully to guard himself from the expression of any sort of emotion not in keeping with the character of an impartial judge and unprejudiced spectator, but who, on the subject in question, cannot wholly repress the natural feeling of disgust, they are sufficiently significant. Gibbon is describing the manners of the Tartar tribes:— “The thrones of Asia have been repeatedly overturned by the shepherds of the North, and their arms have spread terror and devastation over the most fertile and warlike countries of Europe. On this occasion, as well as on many others, the sober historian is forcibly awakened from a pleasing vision, and is compelled, with some reluctance, to confess that the pastoral manners, which have been adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence, are much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a military life. “To illustrate this observation, I shall now proceed to consider a nation of shepherds and of warriors in the three important articles of (1) their diet, (2) their habitations, and (3) their exercises. 1. The corn, or even the rice, which constitutes the ordinary and wholesome food of a civilised people, can be obtained only by the patient toil of the husbandman. Some of the happy savages who dwell between the tropics are plentifully nourished by the liberality of Nature; but in the climates of the North a nation of shepherds is reduced to their flocks and herds. The skilful practitioners of the medical art will determine (if they are able to determine) how far the temper of the human mind may be affected by the use of animal or of vegetable food; and whether the common association of carnivorous and cruel deserves to be considered in any other light than that of an innocent, perhaps a salutary, prejudice of humanity. Yet if it be true that the sentiment of compassion is imperceptibly weakened by the sight and practice of domestic cruelty, we may observe that the horrid objects which are disguised by the arts of European refinement are exhibited in their naked and most disgusting simplicity in the tent of a Tartar shepherd. The Oxen or the Sheep are slaughtered by the same hand from which they were accustomed to receive their daily food, and the bleeding limbs are served, with very little preparation, on the table of their unfeeling murderers.” To the poets, who claim to be the interpreters and priests of Nature, we might, with justness, look for celebration of the anti-materialist living. Unhappily we too generally look in vain. The prophet-poets—Hesiod, KalidÂsa, Milton, Thomson, Shelley, Lamartine—form a band more noble than numerous. Of those who, not having entered the very sanctuary of the temple of humanitarianism, have been content to officiate in its outer courts, Burns and Cowper occupy a prominent place. That the latter, who felt so keenly “The persecution and the pain That man inflicts on all inferior kinds Regardless of their plaints,” and who has denounced with so eloquent indignation the pitiless wars “waged with defenceless innocence,” and the protean shapes of human selfishness, should yet have stopped short of the final cause of them all, would be inexplicable but for the blinding influence of habit and authority. Nevertheless, his picture of the savagery of the Slaughter-House, and of some of its associated cruelties, is too forcible to be omitted: “To make him sport, To justify the phrensy of his wrath, Or his base gluttony, are causes good And just, in his account, why bird and beast Should suffer torture, and the stream be dyed With blood of their inhabitants impaled. Earth groans beneath the burden of a war Waged with defenceless Innocence: while he, Not satisfied to prey on all around, Adds tenfold bitterness to death by pangs Needless, and first torments ere he devours. Now happiest they who occupy the scenes The most remote from his abhorred resort. * * * * * * * Witness at his feet The Spaniel dying for some venial fault, Under dissection of the knotted scourge: Witness the patient Ox, with stripes and yells Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs To madness, while the savage at his heels Laughs at the frantic sufferer’s fury spent Upon the heedless passenger o’erthrown. He, too, is witness—noblest of the train Who waits on Man—the flight-performing Horse: With unsuspecting readiness he takes His murderer on his back, and, pushed all day, With bleeding sides, and flanks that heave for life, To the far-distant goal arrives, and dies! So little mercy shows, who needs so much! Does Law—so jealous in the cause of Man[?]— Denounce no doom on the delinquent? None.” |
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