The Catholic World, Vol. 17, April, 1873 to September, 1873 / A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science

by Various

CHAPTER XXIII.

VICTOR’S DEATH.—PLOTS AGAINST LOUIS.

For ten long months, Victor had suffered from a terrible malady that never lets go. Every remedy had been tried in vain. His disease was phthisis of a peculiar kind and of the most alarming character. The two physicians we consulted could only reply when their patient insisted on knowing the truth: “Your illness is of an extremely serious nature; but you are young, and at your age nature often finds unexpected resources in a time of danger.”

It was impossible to cure him. They could only prolong his life, and this was the aim of the physicians. By dint of care, they succeeded in keeping him alive till the beginning of September. Then the disease, whose ravages we had not realized, suddenly came to a crisis. Throughout the whole course of his sufferings, I had, in spite of everything, cherished a secret hope in the depths of my heart. When one of those favorable turns came peculiar to such complaints, I flattered myself that he would get well, and abandoned myself to a foolish joy. This joy, so natural, and yet so unreasonable, gave Victor pain. He endeavored to moderate it in a thousand ingenious and delicate ways. He himself was never under any illusion. His illness was fatal: he knew it, and calmly prepared himself for what he called the great journey. He was greatly afflicted to see I was not, like himself, preparing for our separation, the thought of which became more painful in proportion to the horror with which I regarded it. He tried to banish all my false hopes, but his efforts were in vain. I clung to them without owning it. I only gave them up at the time I have arrived at in my sad story. Then I began to realize the frightful truth, and, as I saw his alarming symptoms increase, I thought I should die.

Victor at length succeeded in restoring somewhat of calmness to my soul. With a strength of mind that increased in proportion to the nearness of that awful moment, he made his final preparations. He gave himself up to the contemplation of eternal things. His friend, the good Abbé Merlin, administered the last consolations of religion. Louis received them with a faith that edified every one, and a joy that showed how he had profited by his illness to prepare for heaven. He was already there in spirit, and longed to be there in reality. This touched me, and I confess, to my great shame, I reproached him in my excessive grief with some expressions of bitterness. This was the last sorrow I caused my poor husband. Such reproaches could only come from a selfish soul. I now blush at the remembrance.

All these necessary steps having been taken, Victor told me I must send for Louis. As you know, he received my note in the evening. That very night he arrived. It was high time. We all three passed the night together talking, praying, and weeping by turns. Victor consoled us. He even forced himself to express anxiety as to Louis’ affairs. The latter spoke of them very unwillingly, for his grief overpowered his sense of love. When Victor learned the trials he was undergoing, he said:

“My friend, I fear they are contriving some new plot against you. Eugénie loves you; there is no doubt of that in my mind; but does she love you well enough to withstand all the difficulties that are rising up around you? I know not. If, with her knowledge of you, she allows herself to be influenced by people of evil intentions, it seems to me you will have a right to judge her severely.”

“Even then I could not,” said Louis.

“Your answer does not surprise me. It proves I was right in my impressions. You love her as much as a good man ought to love. You even love her too well; for I believe your affection would render you insensible to the truth rather than blame the object of your love.”

“That is true.”

“I cannot approve of that. It is not right. There is only one thing, there is only one Being, a noble and well-balanced soul, a soul thoroughly imbued with piety, allows itself to love above all things—that thing is truth, that Being is God. Believe me, if Eugénie allows herself to be alienated from you, it will be a proof she has not the worth you give her credit for, and also that it is not the will of God she should become your wife. Well, I will not oppose the indulgence you feel towards her. I consent to it. Say to yourself she has been deceived, that she is innocent, but submit to the divine will. Do not attempt impossibilities to link together the chain God himself breaks, however dear she may be to you.”

Victor seemed to have recalled all the energy of his manly nature to utter these words. His firmness and judicious counsel were not lost on Louis.

“I will follow your advice,” said he; “but promise to pray this sorrow may be spared me. God has endowed the one I love with a soul so elevated that it would be easy to make her as pious as an angel.... And I love her so much!”

“My poor friend! I do not know that I shall be permitted to pray at once for you in yonder world. If I can, I will pray God you may be united with her, if this union will render you happy—happy, understand me, in the Christian sense of the word; that is to say, happy and better, both of you.”

In the middle of the night, Victor requested me to go into the next chamber for some papers he wanted. He availed himself of this opportunity to recommend me to Louis’ care, as I afterwards learned.

“Agnes,” said he, “has exhausted her strength in taking care of me so many months. Her physical and mental strength are now merely factitious. It is the very excess of her grief that sustains her. As soon as I am gone, she will be sensible of her weakness. I fear the reaction may prove fatal to her. I implore you to take her and her mother to some place near you in the country. Find them a temporary residence that is healthy and pleasant. Change of scene and pure country air will do her more good than anything else, especially if you add the benefit of your efforts to console her, on which I depend.”

Louis made the required promise.... But these recollections are still too painful. Alas! they will always be so. You will excuse me from dwelling on them.

The next day, I lost the companion of my life. That pure soul, so full of intelligence, sweetness, and energy, took flight for heaven, leaving me for ever sad and desolate upon earth.... Oh! how happy are those women who to the very hour of death are permitted by God to retain the companionship of a husband tenderly loved, and worthy of being so!...

The first moments of overpowering grief had scarcely passed before that which Victor had foreseen took place. All at once I lost my apparent strength. I was weighed down with a dull despair. My poor mother trembled for my life. Throughout the day I sat motionless in an arm-chair, interested in no person or subject. My lips alone made an effort from time to time to murmur the words at once so bitter and so sweet: “O Lord! thou gavest him to me; thou hast taken him away; thy will be done!” That was my only prayer. I repeated it from morning till night. Thus lifting my soul heavenward, I found strength to resist the temptation to rebel which constantly assailed me.

During that sad time, Louis’ sister joined him in unceasing attentions to me. Louis gave himself entirely up to my service, and notified Mr. Smithson he should be absent several days longer from the manufactory. You can realize how generous this was in him. To absent himself at a time his dearest interests were at stake, and leave the field clear for his enemies, was making an heroic sacrifice to friendship. It was not till a subsequent period I fully appreciated it. At that time, I was wholly absorbed in myself. Extreme grief becomes a kind of passion, and, like all passions, it renders us selfish.

When Louis at last saw me a little calmer, he told me of Victor’s wish. “His last request was,” said he, “that you should go into the country awhile with your mother. The air is purer there, and you will regain your strength.”

I exclaimed against the proposition. I declared I would not leave the house in which Victor died—where everything recalled his presence. Louis insisted, urged on by the physicians, who declared the change indispensable.

“Victor himself implores you through me to consent,” said he. “Remember you will be still obeying him in so doing.”

I ended by yielding to their persuasions. “But where shall I go?” said I.

“To St. M——, where you will be near me. My sister went there yesterday, and found you pleasant lodgings. You can easily go that far with your mother and sister.”

We went there the next day. It was Louis who made all the arrangements, and with how much solicitude and affection I need not say. At length he left us to resume his duties at the mill. The last favor I begged of him was to come and see me often, but not to mention to any one the place of my retirement. Like all who are in real affliction, solitude alone pleased me. The first time for a week, Louis’ thoughts, after leaving me, recurred to the subjects that had absorbed his mind previous to Victor’s death. He began to be alarmed. He wondered if Eugénie had not forgotten him, if she really loved him, if Mr. Smithson was disposed to regard him with more or with less favor, and if Albert had not profited by his absence to injure him in the estimation of Eugénie’s family. But he could only form conjectures as to all this.

Now that these events have passed away, I can seize all the details at a glance. I shall therefore tell you many things Louis was necessarily ignorant of when he returned to the manufactory. He would have trembled had he been aware of them. He had scarcely left his post in order to be with Victor during his last moments, when his enemies, thinking the time propitious, resolved to profit by his absence to effect his ruin. They all set to work at once.

The deceitful Adams, who had sought to be enlightened as to his religious doubts, went around telling everybody the engineer had convinced him of the falseness of his religion, which he resolved to abjure, and only waited for Louis’ return. People began by laughing at what he said. They had no great opinion of the fellow. They suspected his connection with Durand, who was regarded with fear. Some even thought it was all a trick. But Adams returned to the charge; he spoke with an air of conviction, he seemed changed. To carry out the scheme, he apparently broke off with his former friend, Durand.

All these things were repeated from one to another till they reached Mr. Smithson’s ears. He had been obliged to superintend the workmen during Louis’ absence from the manufactory. Already inclined to be suspicious of the engineer, and ignorant of the ties that bound him to Victor, Mr. Smithson interiorly accused him of first manifesting an ultra, I may say, fanatical zeal, and then falling into an indifference and carelessness unworthy of a consistent man. “Because one of his friends is ill,” he said, “is that a sufficient reason for abandoning his post, leaving me overwhelmed with work, and interrupting the school he had begun?... And all this without making any arrangement beforehand!... The man is inconsistent!”

Mr. Smithson was therefore unfavorably disposed towards Louis, when, to complete his dissatisfaction, came the news, at first doubtful, then certain, of Adams’ intended abjuration. He became so angry that he could not contain himself, though generally so capable of self-control. The interests of his national religion were at stake. He at once became furious, and made no effort to conceal it.

Mme. Smithson and Albert of course took Mr. Smithson’s part against Louis. He was berated as a man of no discretion, deceitful, fanatical, and a Jesuit in disguise. Mme. Smithson was one of those people who boldly say: “I don’t think much of a person who changes his religion!” As if it were not merely reasonable for a man to give up error for truth when the truth is revealed to him. Albert was influenced by motives you are already aware of. He was triumphant. He had never expected such success from so simple a trick. Circumstances had indeed favored him but too well. Seeing Mr. Smithson in such a frame of mind, he had no doubts of his dismissing Louis as soon as he returned.

But his joy was strangely diminished by an unexpected incident. They were discussing the affair one evening in the salon. “Excuse me, father,” said Eugénie, “for meddling with what does not concern me, but you know I always was the advocate of a bad cause.”

Every one looked up at this unexpected interruption. Eugénie was not a woman to be intimidated when she foresaw opposition: rather, the contrary. She continued, without being troubled in the least: “I find a great many are disposed to attack M. Louis, but no one thinks of defending him. It were to be wished some one would be his defender, though I do not say his conduct is irreproachable.”

“Very far from that,” said Mr. Smithson.

“But if he is not innocent, is he as culpable as he may have appeared? What is he accused of? He has been absent several days from the mill. This adds greatly to your labors, my dear father, but his absence is justifiable to a certain degree. Do you know M. Louis’ history?”

“As well as you, I suppose, child.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Has he related it to you?”

“No; Fanny took pains to do that. Fanny is at once curious and a gossip.”

“My cousin is very severe towards so devoted a servant. Is she indulgent only to the culpable?”

This ill-timed interruption gave Eugénie a glimpse of light. “There is an understanding between them,” she said to herself, “and that explains many things.” She continued, addressing her father: “M. Louis made an attempt at his own life. He was drowning, when a brave man and an invalid—M. Barnier—at the risk of his own life, threw himself into the river, and saved him. This was the origin of their friendship, which does honor to M. Louis and to the person so devoted to him. This M. Barnier is dying to-day.”

“Who told you so, my child?” asked Mr. Smithson.

“The newspapers from town allude to it. M. Barnier is a well-known man, and esteemed by his very enemies themselves. It is to be with him M. Louis is gone. Does not such a motive justify his absence?”

Mr. Smithson had attentively listened to what his daughter said. If we except what related to religious subjects, he was an impartial and even kindly disposed man. “With such a reason for his absence,” he replied, “I shall cease to regard it as inexcusable. Nevertheless, he ought to have made me aware of what had taken place. He simply said he was going to stay with a sick friend: that was not a sufficient explanation. What I dislike in the man is his dissimulation.”

“I acknowledge there may be some reason for distrust,” resumed Eugénie, “but he has given no proofs of duplicity since he came here that I am aware of. He certainly has done nothing without consulting you, father.”

“He did, to be sure, propose several things he wished to do; but did he reveal his real aim, his ultimate object?”

“Had he any?”

“Had he any?... The Adams affair proves it. The evening-school and the library were only founded to propagate Catholicism.”

“With what object?”

“The aim of these enthusiasts is always the same. They wish to impart their belief to others, that they may afterwards exercise authority over their disciples. Louis and the curé are linked together. Their project is to make my manufactory like a convent, where they can reign in spite of me. But I will settle that matter.”

“And you will do right, uncle,” said Albert. “There is no tyranny more artful and more encroaching than that of the priesthood.”

“I did not know my cousin detested the clergy to such a degree,” said Eugénie, with an air of mockery and disdain which convinced Albert he had made a fresh blunder. “I thought, on the contrary, you had a sincere respect for priests. It seems I was deceived....”

“Enough on this point,” said Mr. Smithson. “I will see Adams, and learn from him what has occurred. And I will speak to the engineer accordingly when he returns.”

This conversation took place in the evening. Mme. Smithson was present. She did not speak, but was extremely irritated. Eugénie little thought she had caused her mother as great an affliction as she had ever experienced in her life. For ten, perhaps fifteen, years, Mme. Smithson had clung to the idea of a match between her daughter and nephew. She had taken comfort in the thought of uniting the two beings she loved best on earth. Besides, it was a good way, and the only one in her power, of securing to Albert a fortune he had need of; for the career he had embraced, and the tastes he had imbibed, made it necessary he should be wealthy, which was by no means the case. This plan till lately had been confined to Mme. Smithson’s own breast; but, since Albert’s arrival, she had ventured to allude to it in her conversations with him. The latter responded with enthusiastic gratitude, expressing an ardent desire to have the proposed union realized. Alas! from the beginning there had been one difficulty which fretted Mme. Smithson. Would her husband approve of her scheme? As Albert approached manhood, this consent became more and more doubtful. Mr. Smithson treated his nephew kindly, but had no great opinion of him, and did not like him. How overcome this obstacle? There was only one way: Eugénie herself must desire the marriage. Mr. Smithson never opposed his daughter, and would then overlook his antipathy to the object of her choice. Things were having a very different tendency. Mme. Smithson had long tried to hide the fact from herself, but she must at last acknowledge it: Eugénie manifested no partiality for her cousin. This evening’s occurrence banished all illusion. She not only saw Eugénie had not the least thought of marrying Albert, but she suspected her of loving another, ... a man Mme. Smithson could no longer endure. He had in her eyes three faults, any one of which would have set her against him: he was her dear nephew’s rival, he had no property, and he was grave and pious to a degree that could not fail to be repulsive to a trivial woman and a half-way Christian like her. To complete her despair, Albert came secretly to see her that very same evening.

“Aunt,” said he, “our affairs are getting on badly!... Confess that I had more penetration than you were willing to allow.”

“What! what! what do you mean? Do you think Eugénie loves that spendthrift, that bigot?... Nonsense! she only wishes to tease you.”

“I am of a different opinion. I have long been aware of her fancy for him. What she said in his favor this evening was very judicious and moderate, but there was in the tone of her voice, ... in her look, a something I could not mistake. For the first time, she betrayed her feelings. I tell you she loves him!”

“Why, that would be dreadful!”

“I foresaw it.”

“Foresaw!—such a thing?”

“Eugénie is romantic, and the rogue puts on the air of a hero of romance.”

“Set your heart at rest, Albert. I promise to watch over your interests. I assure you, in case of need, I will bring your uncle himself to your aid.”

“I will talk to Eugénie to-morrow morning,” she said to herself. “I shall never believe in such presumption till she confesses it herself.”

The next morning, Mme. Smithson went, full of anxiety, to her daughter’s chamber. Eugénie was that very moment thinking of Louis. The more she examined her own heart, the more clearly she saw herself forced to acknowledge her esteem for him. She had inwardly condemned him many times, but had as often found her suspicions were groundless. Without showing the least partiality for Louis, she could not help seeing he was intelligent, energetic, and sincerely pious. She even acknowledged that, of all the men she had ever met, not one was to be compared to him; he was superior to them all in every respect. From this, it was not a long step to confess him worthy of her affection. But he—did he love her?... Not a word, not a sign, had escaped him to indicate such a thing, and yet there was in his bearing towards her, in the tone of his voice, and in the value he attached to her good opinion, a something that assured her she had made a profound impression on him. But, then, why this coldness so rigorously maintained?... He was poor—and through his own fault—while she was rich. His coldness perhaps resulted from extreme delicacy.

Eugénie cut short her reflections by repeating: “Does he love me?... It may be. Do I love him?... I dare not say no. But we are in a peculiar position. If I find him, at the end of the account, worthy of being my husband, doubtless I should have to make the advances! But I like originality in everything. My father alone excites my fears. M. Louis would not be his choice. Why does he show himself so zealous a Catholic at present? Why not wait till he is married—if married we ever are? Then he could be as devoted to the church as he pleases.”

Mme. Smithson was hardly to be recognized when she entered her daughter’s room. She was generally affable and smiling, but now her face was lowering and agitated. She was evidently very nervous, as was usually the case when she had some disagreeable communication to make to her daughter. Eugénie at once divined what was passing in her mother’s heart. She was careful, however, not to aid her in unburdening herself.

After speaking of several things of no importance, Mme. Smithson assumed an unconcerned air—a sign of her extreme embarrassment—and broached the subject with a boldness peculiar to timid people when they see there is no way of receding.

“I must confess that was a strange notion of yours last evening.”

“What notion do you refer to, mother?” said Eugénie, in a tone at once dignified and ingenuous. She felt the storm was coming. As usual on such occasions, she laid aside the familiar thou for the respectful you. There was a spice of mischief in her tactics which I do not intend to applaud. She thus redoubled her mother’s embarrassment, and by the politeness of her manner increased her hesitation.

“What notion do I refer to?... You need not ask that. You know well enough what I allude to.... Yes; why should you, without any obligation, set yourself up to defend a man who is no relation of ours or even one of our friends, but a mere employé of your father’s; one who suits him certainly, but who is likely to cause trouble in the house; ... who is, in short, a dangerous man?...”

“You astonish me to the last degree, mother! I never, no, never should have suspected M. Louis of dangerous designs, or that he even had the power to disturb us.”

“Raillery, my dear, is in this case quite out of place. What secret motive have you for undertaking his defence?”

“I? I have none. What motive could I have?”

“Then, why take sides against us?”

“Why, I have not taken sides against you!”

“How can you deny it?”

“I do deny it, mother, with your permission. My father imputed intentions to M. Louis which perhaps he never had. I merely observed it would be more just to wait for proofs before condemning him. That is all, and a very small affair.”

“Wait for proofs before condemning him, do you say?... Well, he has them. Adams has confessed everything.... He acknowledges that M. Louis endeavored to convert him, lent him books, taught him the catechism, and, what was worse, dwelt a great deal on hell as a place he could not fail to go to if he, Adams, remained a Protestant. The poor fellow has not recovered from his terror yet!... Your father has talked to him very kindly, given him good advice, mingled with kind reproaches. Adams was affected, and ended by saying he never wished to see M. Louis again; and he did a lucky thing!”

“It seems to me that Adams is either a simpleton or a hypocrite.”

“Eugénie, that is altogether too much!”

“I do not see anything very astonishing in what I have said. Please listen to me a moment, mother. To hesitate between two creeds, without being able to decide on either, seems to me a proof of weakness. But if, on the contrary, Adams invented this story of his conversion in order to yield at a favorable moment and gain the good-will of my father more than ever, would not this show a duplicity and artfulness that could only belong to a hypocrite?...”

“Adams could not have invented such a thing. It would have rendered him liable to dismissal.”

“I beg your pardon, mother. Adams did not risk anything. The course he has taken proves it. And that is precisely what makes me distrust him.”

“How can you impute such motives to anybody!... Adams has renounced his intention, because he was convinced by your father’s arguments. He has behaved like an honest man!”

“Excuse me, mother; we are in more danger than ever of not understanding each other. Why! you seem to rejoice that Adams has returned to his errors! You appear to think his course very natural, and to approve of it!”

“Yes, I do approve of it; people ought not to change their religion.”

“You might as well say a person ought not to acknowledge his error when he is mistaken. I am by no means of your opinion, though I am not very religious.”

“A propos of religion, my dear, you seem to have taken a strange turn. You have grown so rigorous as to astonish me; there is not an ultra notion you do not approve of. You have completely changed since.... But I will not make you angry.”

“Since M. Louis came here?... A pretty idea. But I am not surprised.”

“You said it yourself, but it is true. Since that man came here, you have changed every way. I know not why or wherefore, but it is a fact. Your cousin himself has observed it, and it grieves him. You are no longer towards him as you once were. You keep him at a distance. You are not lively as you used to be. You only talk of things serious enough to put one asleep.”

“It is nearly ten years since I was brought in such close contact with my cousin as now. I was very young then. I have grown older and more sensible. Why has not he done the same?”

“Your sarcasm is malicious and unmerited. Albert is a charming fellow.”

“Oh! I agree with you! But this very fact injures him in my estimation. A charming fellow is one who requires an hour to dress; is skilled in paying a multitude of compliments he does not mean; has a petty mind that only takes interest in trifles; in short, a useless being it is impossible to rely on. When Albert came, he seemed to be conscious of the absurdity of being a charming fellow. He tried to put on a semblance of gravity, but it did not last long. Once more the proverb held good: Chasser le naturel, il revient au galop.”[197]

“Wonderful, my dear. You have every qualification for a dévote: especially one characteristic—maliciousness. Poor Albert! how you have set him off! Happily, there is not a word of truth in all you have said. He a man on whom you cannot rely! He has a heart of gold.”

“I do not dispute the goodness of his heart. I have never put it to the proof.”

“What a wicked insinuation! How dreadful it is to always believe the worst of everybody.”

“Well, let it be so: he has a kind heart!... But is there any depth to him?”

“As much as is necessary. This would be a sad world if we were always obliged to live with moody people like some one I know of. I really believe he is your beau ideal.”

“I do not say that; but, if he is really what he appears to be, he merits my good opinion. I wish all I live with resembled him.”

“Well done! A little more, and you will tell me he is the realization of all your dreams.”

“I do not know him well enough to accord him all your words seem to imply.”

“At all events, you know him well enough to take an interest in him, and much more than would suit your father.... Your cousin even was scandalized at your daring to defend him against your father, who had good reason to blame him.”

“My cousin would do well to attend to his own affairs, and not meddle with mine. If he came here to watch me, sneer at me, and give me advice, he had better have remained in Paris.”

“He came here hoping to find the friend of his childhood glad to see him, and ready to show him the affection he merits. Everybody does not judge him as severely as you do. I know many girls who....”

“Who would be glad to marry him! Well, they may have him!”

“That is too much! The son of my sister whom I love with all my heart! A child whom I brought up and love almost as much as I do you!”

“But, mother, I am not displeased because you love him. I do not dislike him. I wish him well, and would do him all the good in my power. But when I make choice of a husband, I shall choose one with qualities Albert will never possess.”

“I have suspected it for a long time. Yes; I thought long ago, seeing the turn your mind was taking, that, when you married, it would be foolishly.”

“What do you mean by foolishly?”

“Marrying a man without property, or one with eccentric notions, or some prosy creature of more or less sincerity. I am very much afraid you are infatuated about an individual who has all these defects combined. Fortunately.... You understand me....”

“What, mother?”

“Yes; we shall watch over your interests, your father and I, and if you are disposed to make a foolish match, like one that occurs to me, we shall know how to prevent it. We shall not hesitate if obliged to render you happy in spite of yourself.”

“Render me happy?... At all events, it would not be by forcing me to marry Albert.”

“Anyhow, you shall marry no one else.... It is I who say so, and your father will show you he is of my opinion.”

Upon this, Mme. Smithson went out, violently shutting the door after her. Like all people of weak character, she must either yield or fall into a rage. It was beyond her ability to discuss or oppose anything calmly.

It was all over! All her plans were overthrown! She must bid farewell to her dearest hopes! She must no longer think of retaining Albert and sending for his mother—for Mme. Smithson’s desires went as far as that! Her dream was to unite the two families by marrying Eugénie and Albert. Instead of that, what a perspective opened before her!—a marriage between her daughter and Louis, which roused all her antipathies at once! She was beside herself at the bare thought of seeing herself connected with a son-in-law she could not endure, and who was no less repulsive to Mr. Smithson.... Her maternal heart was kind when no one contradicted her, but there was in its depths, as often happens in weak natures, a dash of spitefulness. Having returned to her chamber, Mme. Smithson began to reflect. She seldom gave herself up to reflection, and then only when she was troubled, as is the case with some people. As might be supposed, she was too excited to reflect advantageously.

“Oh! oh!” she said to herself, “Eugénie dares resist me the only time I ever asked her to obey! She despises Albert. She speaks scornfully of him! And that is not sufficient: she carries her audacity so far as to sing the praises of a man I detest!... See what it is to be indulgent to one’s children! The day comes when, for a mere caprice, they tread under foot what was dearest to you.... Well, since she will do nothing for me, I will do nothing for her.... She rejects Albert. I will have the other one driven away.... Since that meddler came, everything has gone wrong here.... What a nuisance that man is! If he had not come here, everything would have gone on as I wished.... I will go in search of my husband. It will be easy to have the engineer sent off, after committing so many blunders. When he is gone, we shall have to endure my daughter’s ill-humor, but everything comes to an end in this world. The time will come when, realizing her folly, Eugénie will listen to reason.”

The interview between Mr. Smithson and his wife took place a little while after. What was said I never knew. Mme. Smithson alluded to it once or twice at a later day, but merely acknowledged she did very wrong. The remembrance was evidently painful, and she said no more.

Eugénie at once foresaw this private interview between her parents. The conversation she had just had with her mother only served to enlighten her more fully as to the state of her feelings. Forced to express her opinion of Albert and Louis, she had spoken from her heart. She was herself in a measure astonished at seeing so clearly she did not love Albert—that there was a possibility of loving Louis—that perhaps she already loved him.... And she also comprehended more clearly all the difficulties such an attachment would meet with. Her mother’s opposition had hitherto been doubtful. It was now certain, and the consequence was to be feared.

“My mother is so much offended,” she said to herself, “that she will try to unburden her mind to my father at once, and perhaps influence him against me. Before the day is over, she will tell him all I said, and the thousand inferences she has drawn from it. This interview fills me with alarm! I wish I knew what they will decide upon, if they come to any decision....”

Eugénie tried in vain to get some light on the point, but was not able to obtain much. The interview took place. Mr. Smithson seemed vexed and thoughtful after his wife left the office. Mme. Smithson went directly to give the porter orders to send the engineer to her husband as soon as he arrived. Louis had sent word the evening before he should return the following day.

TO BE CONTINUED.

---

[SONNET.]

THE RUINS OF EMANIA (NEAR ARMAGH).

BY AUBREY DE VERE.

Why seek we thus the living ‘mid the dead?
Beneath yon mound—within yon circle wide—
Emania’s palace, festive as a bride
For centuries six, had found its wormy bed
When Patrick lifted here his royal head,
And round him gazed. Perhaps the Apostle sighed
Even then, to note the fall of mortal pride—
Full fourteen hundred years since then have fled!
Then, too, old Ulster’s hundred kings were clay;
Then, too, the Red Branch warriors slept forlorn;
Autumn, perhaps, as now, a pilgrim gray,
Her red beads counted on the berried thorn,
Making her rounds; while from the daisied sod
The undiscountenanced lark upsoared, and praised her God.

---

[APPEAL TO WORKINGMEN.]

FROM THE FRENCH OF LEON GAUTIER IN THE REVUE DU MONDE CATHOLIQUE.

DISCOURSE PRONOUNCED JANUARY 13, 1873, TO INAUGURATE THE LECTURES INTENDED FOR THE WORKING-CLASSES.[198]

To-day we inaugurate the lectures specially consecrated to workingmen. We are full of joyous hopes, and believe that this work of light will be at the same time a work of reconciliation, of love, and of peace. The cross, which we have placed conspicuously in all our places of reunion—the cross, that we elevate and display everywhere as a magnificent standard—the cross, that we will never consent to hide, indicates clearly what is our faith and what is our aim. We wish to enlighten your understandings, dilate your hearts, direct your wills in the way of the good, the beautiful, and the true. In a word, we wish to conquer you for Christ, and we say it here with a frankness which profoundly abhors all cunning of speech. You will give us credit for sincerity, which you have always loved; for, as has been said by a great contemporary orator,[199] “The people are not deceived; they feel when they are approached with faith in them and in their eminent dignity.”

We come, then, to you with this cross of Constantine, which has converted the world. This glorious sign we have surrounded with rays, to show you that light proceeds from Christianity, as the stream flows from its source, and the beams radiate from a star. If possible, we would have adopted as a flag the beautiful cross in the catacomb of S. Pontian, from which spring roses—symbols of joy. We would have chosen it, to show you that in Christ is found not only the repose of the enlightened understanding, but also the repose, the joy, and the alleluia of the satisfied heart. It is by this sign we will conquer.

In this first lecture, which will serve as an humble preface to the discourses of so many eminent orators, we intend only to take up the working question, to tell you our entire thought on the subject, to open to you our whole heart. Do not hope to hear an academic speech; do not expect those vain compliments to which you have been accustomed from flatterers who did not love you. We say at first and without circumlocution that between Christian society and the working world there exists to-day a certain misunderstanding, and it is this misunderstanding we would wish to dissipate, and we beg of the divine Workman of Nazareth to direct our words, blessed by him, to the understanding and heart of the workmen of Paris.

In the first part of this discourse, which will be brief, we will say what we are; in the second, what we wish; and in the third, we will reply to certain objections to the church which are current among workingmen, and cause the deplorable misunderstanding from which we wish to deliver your minds and hearts, equally oppressed. It is time that the truth should free you.

I.

In order that you may better understand what we are, we wish to commence by showing you what we are not.

We are not politicians; this we desire to declare openly. Never, never will there be pronounced in this precinct one word that may even remotely touch upon our old or recent discords. We will never deserve to be called partisans. Whatever may be our intimate convictions (and we have the right to have them), we only wish to be and we will only be Christians. We suppose there may be in the bosom of all the avowed parties sincere Catholics who are by no means independents. When we tread upon the threshold of her basilicas, the church, which rises before us, does not ask if we are monarchists or republicans, but only if we believe in the eternal Word, who created heaven and earth, who became man in the crib of Bethlehem, and who saved us on a cross. Thus will we do, and the only popular song you will hear in this place will be the Credo; come, come, and sing it with us.

Thank God, we do not belong to the group, too numerous, of pretended conservatives, who only see in the labor question a painful preoccupation which might trouble the calm of their digestion; who do not wish to impose upon themselves any real sacrifice, and are easily astonished that the working-classes complain of their sufferings. We are not like the fashionable and delicate egoists who for several centuries have given the fatal example of indifference, of doubt, and of negation in religion, who have followed Voltaire, who have wickedly laughed in the face of outraged truth, who have torn God from the heart of the workman, and who nevertheless persist in affirming that “religion is good for the people”—men of refinement, who to-day edit journals full of talent, where on the first page is offered ultra-conservative articles, and on the second ultra-obscene romances. No; we are not of this class. Away with those sceptics whose fears make them pretend to have the faith! Away with those who doubt the people, and who do not love them!

We are not of those who are led to you by this vile fear or by a still viler interest; we are not of those who see in you an armed force before which they must tremble, or an electoral majority before whom they must kneel. We will never come to solicit your votes, and we are bent upon serving you with absolute disinterestedness. Briefly, we are for you and will always be your friends and servants, but will never condescend to court you. Besides, the victory which we desire is not that which can be gained by force, consequently we do not count on force. We only wish to win your understandings with our faith, your hearts with our love.

We do not place the golden age in a past too superstitiously loved. Whatever affection I may feel in my heart for those dear middle ages, to which I have consecrated all my studies and all my life, I do not find them sufficiently Christian to be the only ideal. We know that those centuries, so differently judged, were the theatre of a gigantic struggle between paganism, more and more conquered, and the church, more and more victorious; and we draw a fundamental distinction between the chivalry that so heroically defended the truth and the feudality that did it such injury. We do not ignore the fact that paganism, in dying, left to the Christian ages, as a frightful legacy, the traditions of slavery, impurity, and violence; and we confess that Christianity could not in one day decapitate the hundred-headed hydra.

If we regard especially the workmen’s guilds or corporations, we will go so far as to own that their organization, so admirably Christian in some respects, nevertheless left too much room for certain abuses that we hate; and, as a decisive example, we assert that the material condition of the members was not then what a Christian heart would wish to-day. We have the religion, not the superstition, of the middle ages; of that epoch so unworthily calumniated we preserve all the elements truly Christian, and reject the others. We recognize in that rude and laborious age the dawn, the beautiful dawn, of Catholic civilization so scandalously interrupted by the Renaissance. In those centuries, so slighted and misunderstood, we salute above all the cycle of the saints.

We ardently love the sublime period when S. Benedict gave to a hundred thousand men and to twenty generations the order and signal to clear the minds and the fields, equally sterile; when S. Francis conversed with the birds of the air, reconciled all nature with humanity Christianized, and gave to his contemporaries the love of “our lady, poverty!” We love the period made joyful by the death of slavery under the font of the church; when all the institutions of the state and of the family were energetically Catholic; when royalty was represented by a S. Louis, love by a S. Elizabeth, science by a S. Thomas of Aquinas. But our soul has still stronger wings, and would fly still higher. We wish still more, we wish still better, and we will build up the future with two kinds of materials—with the past undoubtedly, but also with our desires, which are vast.

We are not of those who ingenuously think the world at present is organized as one would wish. Doubtless there are in the working-class of our time illegitimate desires, guilty jealousies, unrighteous thirsts; but we also know all that the world of laborers can offer to the eyes of God, of cruel sufferings, of noble sighs, and of honest tears. God preserve us from ever laughing at one of those griefs, even should they be merited! On the contrary, we hope that Christian society will one day come, through peace and prayer, the sacraments and love, to a better disposition, a more profound pacification, a happier distribution of riches, a wider-spread prosperity, and to something more resembling the reign of God. But, alas! we are convinced that the definitive repartition and equality will only be consummated in eternity. Those who do not believe in a future life will never see their desire of infinite justice satisfied—they condemn themselves to this punishment.

We do not despise the work of the hands; far from it, we seek to place the mechanic close to the artist. For centuries, there have been Pyrenees between art and industry; these Pyrenees we wish to remove, and we will succeed. In truth, the workman is an august being; and the title of his nobility will be easily found in the depths of faith and of theology. Listen: the eternal type, the adorable type, of the workman is the Heavenly Father, the Faber divinus, who, not content with making obedient matter spring from nothing, like a sublime goldsmith chiselled it into a splendid jewel. Beauty, Goodness, personal and living Truth—such, to the letter, was the first Workman. God joined, framed, hewed, cemented, carved the whole universe, the firmament, the stars. His gracious and magnificent hand, armed with an invisible chisel, is discovered in every part of the creation which has been wonderfully sculptured by this marvellous Workman. Workmen of every condition, here contemplate the work of your Model, of your Master, of your divine Patron. The sombre forests, the transparent foliage, the flowers whose wonders are only revealed by the microscope, the mountains, the ocean, the infinite depths—all, all were made by the great Workman.

Incomparable Artificer! he conceived the plan of all these beings in His eternal Word, and one day, to realize this design, he pronounced these words: “Be they!” and they were. But it was not enough to show himself the workman; God feared, if I may be allowed so to speak, that his calling might be despised; and he desired so truly to be a workman that of a God he made himself a carpenter as well as man. He chose a noble position, perfectly characteristic, and, with his divine hands, sawed, planed, polished, worked the wood that in the first hour of the world he had worked in the design of the creation. Workmen, my brethren, it is not a fable, it is not a symbol: Jesus, the Son of God, was the apprentice, the companion, the workman, the carpenter; and the venerable monuments of tradition show him to us making ploughs, perhaps crosses. What can I not say to you of the Holy Ghost, considered as the Workman of the spiritual world, which he had really cemented, hewed, and framed? What can I not explain of the beautiful realities of symbolism? With regret I leave this workshop of the church, and now content myself with the workshop of the creation, and with that of Nazareth.

But you question me more earnestly, and ask what I think of the contemporary workman. And I reply that, notwithstanding his faults and errors, I feel for him a great love, invincibly aroused by Christ. Yes; I close my eyes, I abstract myself. I forget so many ignoble flames, so much blood, the pure blood so sacrilegiously shed. I wish to separate my thoughts from so many ruins, so many scandals. I come to you, pagan workman, rebellious to God, and, in the midst of your rebellious and Satanic orgies, I approach you, who formerly were baptized, and place my hand upon your heart, that I may not despair. Your mind is darkened, your will misled; but there are yet some pulsations which allow me still to hope, and I willingly repeat the words of that great bishop who has devoted so much time to the social question: “The people love that which is beautiful, they understand what is great; know that they have high aspirations, and that they seek to rise.” And again: “The workman of our day has eliminated the generous ideas from the Gospel, and yet borrows from Christianity his noble and holy sentiments.”

Nothing is truer; if chemistry could analyze souls, what Christian elements would be found in those of workmen! I readily see in each the admirable material of one of those poor men so powerfully sketched by Victor Hugo. He speaks of a miserable fisherman on the sea-shore, who already has five children, perishing from hunger; when one day at market, he sees and adopts two orphans poorer than he, and thus he reasons: “We have five children, these will make seven; we will mingle them together, and they will climb at night on our knees. They will live, and will be brother and sister to the five others. When God sees that we must feed this little boy and this little girl with the others, he will make us catch more fish, that is all!” Workmen of Paris, read these lines; they are worth more than those of the Année terrible, and paint you exactly. You are capable of this sublime devotion, and I recall you to the true nobility of your nature.

You know now what we are not, and I think that we have never failed for an instant to be truly sincere. On the contrary, we have designedly multiplied all the difficulties with perfect frankness. It is scarcely necessary to add that we are not of those who disdain the social and labor questions, and who, while hiding themselves in the graceful domain of fancy, repeat with Alfred de Musset:

“If two names by chance mingle in my song,
They will always be Ninette or Ninon.”

This charming indifference is but a form of selfishness. Let us go further, and although in our quality of Catholics (the only nobility, the only title to which we are really attached) we place a higher estimate on the future life than the present, we do not think only of the heavenly destiny of the workman. For more than eighteen hundred years, the church has not ceased for an instant to occupy herself with the temporal condition of all the working-classes. In her firmament, there are fourteen magnificent constellations, which are called the seven corporal works of mercy, and the seven spiritual. She has made them all shine on the brow of the workman, and it is for him, above all, that she preserves the light. This example of our mother, the church, we always wish to imitate. We know, besides, and it is a powerful argument, that misery is a poor counsellor, and, if it is badly accepted, turns souls from duty and eternity.

Therefore, we declare a mortal war against want and misery, and it is thus that, in ameliorating the earth, we hope to prepare heaven.

We wish at this moment our heart were an open book, written in large characters, and readable for all. Our brothers, the workmen, would see that we do not blindly accuse them of all the crimes and mistakes of modern society, and that we very well know how to comment severely on the other classes. They would there read the programme of our work, as recently sketched by a great bishop of the holy church: “We should believe in the people, hope in them, love them.” For you must not imagine that alms will here suffice, and that the people will accept them; they exact all our heart, our esteem, our respect. He who does not respect the workman can do nothing. Thus, this doctrine of respect for the workman, the truly Christian doctrine, is the base upon which the Catholic Circle of Workingmen has erected its edifice: may God prosper and bless it!

Ask us now with frankness what we are, what is our faith, and listen well to our reply, which will not be less sincere.

We believe in one only God, the supreme and sovereign Workman, whom we do not confound with his work; the work is divine, but it is not God. Beyond the world, above the world, in an inaccessible region, lives and reigns from everlasting to everlasting the majesty of God, the Infinite and Absolute, the Justice and Mercy, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, living and personal, the eternal Providence, who watches over the workmen of all races and of all times. There are among you some who refuse to this God the free adhesion of their faith, and it is this negation which we come here to combat with the arms of reason and of light. All depends upon your faith; even though you may be atheists, we will love you, but, alas! you will not return our love, and the reconciliation so ardently desired will not be easily realized; for you can only be dissolved in love, and God is love.

We believe, then, in God the Creator, and we bow before him with the simple and magnificent faith of the humble stone-cutter of whom Lamartine speaks, and who one day said to our great poet, “I do not know how other men are made; but, as for me, I cannot see, I do not say a star, but even an ant, the leaf of a tree, a grain of sand, without asking who made it; and the reply is, God. I understand it well, for, before being, it was not; therefore, it could not make itself.” I quote these beautiful words with great joy under the roof of a chapel especially consecrated to workmen. Meditate upon them, workmen, who listen to me; and, if you are republicans, respect, love, believe in what this republican of 1848 respected, loved, and believed. Then the workman believed in God; this time must return, and for this necessary work we will expend our time, our strength, our life. But it is not enough to believe in God; we must render to the Creator the act of the creature, and offer him respect, homage, confidence, prayer, and love. Blessed be this little chapel of Jésus-Ouvrier, if this night one of these sentiments will be offered by one of the souls who are here and listen to me.

We also believe in the Son of God, the Word, the interior Speech, the creative Word of the Father, and we affirm that this Word, at a determined moment of history, came down on our earth that sin had stained, and that had to be purified. To arrive at God, who is absolute purity, we must be white or whitened. Are we white of ourselves? Look into your souls, and answer. Christ, then, came to suffer, to expiate, to die for us all, and especially for all workmen, past, present, and to come. Such is the admirable doctrine of the solidarity of expiation; and it is here that Jesus is again the type of workmen. Oh! who can complain of work, when God for thirty years submitted to the rigorous law of manual labor! Who can complain of suffering, when he bore the weight of all the sufferings of the body and of the human soul! Who can complain of loneliness and abandonment, when this God was betrayed by his tenderest friends, and abandoned by all except his mother, who remained standing at the foot of the cross! Who can complain of dying in solitude, in grief, and in shame, on the pallet of a garret or the bed of a hospital, when he, the Creator of so many millions of suns and of the universe, gave us the example of the most cruel death, after having offered us as model the most wretched life! Ah! they had reason to decree the suppression of the crucifix in the hospitals and schools; for a true workman cannot look at the crucifix without being moved to the bottom of his soul, without extending to it his arms, without being profoundly consoled, without crying, “Behold my Master, my Example, and my Father!”

We believe that Christianity is contained in these words, which we should ponder: “Imitation of Christ,” and, in particular, “Imitation of Jesus the workman.” It is by that means we will be led to give a place to private virtues, which our adversaries do not wish to accord to us. Nowadays it is fashionable among workmen and others to repeat this ill-sounding proposition, which is an exact summary of Victor Hugo’s last work: that “Society is bad, and man is good.” Do not believe it; man is an intelligent, free, responsible being, who can, when he wishes, and with the aid of God, conquer the evil in him, and do good. As society is only a composition of men, it follows and will ever be that, if each one of us becomes purer, more humble, more charitable, better, society will itself become less savage, more enlightened, better organized, every way improved. In political economy, we cannot too highly exalt the rôle of private virtues.

It can be demonstrated mathematically, and it will soon be shown, that everything socially springs from sacrifice. If you wish to know here what distinguishes the Catholics from their enemies, I will tell you very simply that they place duty before right, and that the enemies of the church place right before duty. Certainly, we believe in right as strongly as you can; but we make it the logical consequence and, if I may say so, the reward of accomplished duty. Weigh well this doctrine, to which is attached the destiny of the world.

Finally, we believe in the life everlasting. Doubtless it is to be desired that all men should make every effort for the reign of justice on this earth; in this, the Catholics have not been wanting, nor ever will be. But whatever may be the legitimate beauty of these attempts, I think that the perfection of ideal justice will only be found in the future life, and that, to make the definitive balance of the fate of each man, heaven must always enter in the calculation. Here below there are too many inconsolable sorrows, more suffering than social equality can ever suppress. Alas! there will always be the passions that ravage the heart; always ingratitude and abandonment; always sickness and the death of those whom we love best. Paradise of my God! you will re-establish the equilibrium; paradise of my God! if you are, above all, destined for those who have suffered, you will be assuredly opened to workmen. In this hope I live.

And here I am led to recapitulate, not without emotion, all the benefits that Providence has more especially reserved for you. “A heavenly Father, who merits above all the title of workman, and who made the earth; a God, who comes on earth to take up the plane, the saw, and the hammer, and become the prototype of workmen; an infallible church that for eighteen hundred years has bent over workmen, to enlighten, console, and love them; an eternity of happiness, where all present injustice will be superabundantly repaired.”

Workmen, my brethren, what can you ask further? In the place of God, what could you make better? Answer.

II.

What do we wish, however? In other words, what can we promise you?

First of all, there are twenty promises we cannot make you, and it is our duty here to warn you of our non possumus.

We cannot promise you ever to consider armed revolt as a duty or a right. We cling with all the strength of our understanding to the doctrine that even against injustice the protest should be martyrdom, heroically accepted, heroically submitted. Thus did the first Christians; they allowed themselves to be slaughtered like beautiful sheep, covered with generous blood. This sublimely passive resistance will not take from us, as it never did from them, the liberty of speech; they died declaring their belief in God, the supreme Principle, and in the Son of God, the sovereign Expiator. And when fifteen or eighteen millions had been killed, the church triumphed; she then came forth from the catacombs, and to her was given the mission to enlighten the world.

We do not promise you the liberty of doing evil, and it would be false if we even appeared to make such an engagement. At this instant, there are five hundred men in France who pervert, corrupt, putrefy France; among these are four hundred and ninety writers and ten caricaturists; according to our idea, it is deplorable that they can freely exercise their trade, and destroy with impunity so many millions of souls among young girls, young men, and workmen.

We cannot with sincerity promise you absolute equality on this earth. What we can promise you hereafter is that beautiful equality of Christians who are sprung from the same God-Creator, saved by the same God-Redeemer, enlightened by the same God-Illuminator. It is the equality, the profound equality, of baptism and the eucharist; the equality of souls in trials and reward; it is, in fine, equality in heaven. As for the other, we will exhaust ourselves in the effort to obtain it; but we have two obstacles before us, over which we do not hope to triumph—sickness and vice. No equality is possible with these two scourges, and they are ineradicable. We cannot promise you either illegitimate pleasure or even the end of suffering. In taking suffering from man—which is impossible—they would take from him his resemblance to God, and consequently his true greatness and his titles to heaven. The more we suffer, the more we resemble our Father, the more we merit eternal joy. In suffering will be found the Christian principle, which we cannot efface from the Gospel, and which is even the essence of the Christian life. But we promise to suffer with you, and, as the church has done for eighteen hundred years, to alleviate your sorrows, to heal your wounds, to satisfy your material and moral hunger, and to quench your thirst for truth. The fathers of the church invite us only to consider ourselves as “depositaries of riches.” All property is but a deposit in our hands—a deposit which we are strictly obliged to communicate to you, and for which we must render an account to the Master.

We promise you also faith, which gives to the soul a noble attribute and a happy tranquillity. And with faith we can give you what has been well called the intelligence of life—the intelligence thanks to which the workman knows how to accept inequality, because he sees in the horizon the beautiful perspective of eternity. We promise you calmness in certainty, the consolation that every workman can feel in regarding his divine type; and, in giving you this type, you will possess a rare treasure, for which your souls are justly eager.

We promise you the sweetness of work Christianly accepted. Says a great Christian: “What matters work when Jesus Christ is there?” It is here that we must recall those splendid verses of the greatest of our poets—those verses which we would wish to see written on the walls of all our transfigured workshops: “God, look you—let the senseless reject—causes to be born of labor two daughters: Virtue which makes cheerfulness sweet, and Cheerfulness which makes virtue charming.” And with work, you will conquer also the “courage of life”; for you will be convinced that all beings are subjected to this great law, and that the blows of your hammers are the notes of a universal chant. “All work, each one is at his post; he who governs the state; the savant, who extends the limits of human explorations; the sculptor, who makes the statue spring from his chisel; the poet, who sings between his tears and his sighs; the priest, who punishes and pardons—all, down to you, poor workman, in your smoky workshop. We are all living stones of that cathedral formed of souls and of centuries for the glory of God.”[200] With such thoughts, the day appears short, and labor assumes an exquisite character. What joy to say, “I work with the entire universe; I work as God himself has set me the example.”

Still further, we promise you honor and pride. The Christian workman, he whom we hope to see multiplied in Paris, loves his trade; he is proud of it, and would blush if he did not prefer it to all others. He contemplates with satisfaction the work which he has just accomplished, and, like the Creator, with innocent simplicity, finds it beautiful. He attempts without jealousy to equal and even surpass the best workmen of his kind. He thinks that his country should be the most honorable and the most honored of all, and that France should be the equal of all other powers. On this subject he will not jest, but becomes grave. If he belongs to a corporation, he is enthusiastic for the glory of his banner, and will not allow it to be insulted. When a man thus respects his position, he respects himself, and is led to respect God. Such are the elements of what I willingly term the workman’s honor.

We promise you peace of conscience, the happiness that follows accomplished duty, the repose in joy. Every workman among us should say to his children what one of the most learned men of the day, the illustrious Emmanuel de Rougé, wrote in his will: “May my children preserve the faith. Repose of mind and heart can only be found in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the Saviour of man.” To work, says a contemporary philosopher, is easy; to repose is difficult. Man works without repose when he labors relying only upon himself; he works and reposes when he commences by first confiding himself to God. This is the repose we offer you; it is supremely delicious, and the workman will be led to repose, in working for others, like good Claude des Huttes, the stone-cutter of St. Point, the friend of Lamartine, who, poor as he was, worked gratuitously for those poorer than he, and said to himself, when retiring to rest: “I have earned a good day’s wages; for the poor pay me in friendship, my heart pays me in contentment, and the good God will pay me in mercy.” O greatness of the Christian workman!

We promise to labor as unceasingly for the amelioration of your material condition as for the enlargement of your understanding. Evil be to us if we did not think of the lodging, warming, nourishment of the workman’s family; if we would confiscate science to our profit, and not extend to you the treasure; if we ceased for a single instant to open schools, asylums, circles, conferences, institutions of peace and of light. We do not recoil before progress; no light terrifies us. From texts of the Gospel, we have and ever will produce new consequences, religious, philosophical, and social; and these conclusions constitute a progress incessant and ever new—our progress, the only true progress.

Finally, we promise to organize with your aid the workingmen’s associations. Association only frightens us when it leans towards despotism, and we wish principally to give it a religious character. The confraternity! an old word, which is ridiculed, but which in reality is a great thing; men reunited for one temporal aim under the protection of God, their angel guardians, and their celestial patrons; free men, discussing with all loyalty the interests of their trade, and knowing how to govern themselves. You will invent nothing better, provided always that, in this enlarged institution, the Catholic spirit is harmoniously mingled with the positive rules of social science. We are in the midst of a crisis which cannot last long; to our mutual aid and co-operative societies others will succeed more scientifically organized, and, above all, more Christian. We hope in this future, and believe it very near; it is the ideal for this world now, and for heaven hereafter—heaven, which is the great association of the happy ...

III.

It would seem impossible, in the face of such doctrines, that any misunderstanding could exist between the church and the workman; but Satan has not understood it in this manner, and objections pour against the church.

It has been said repeatedly that the church has done nothing for the workman. It is the conclusion that Victor Hugo has given to his Les Misérables, and this book has singularly contributed to develop hatred in the hearts of the people. Numerous writers, animated with the same ardent hate, affirm daily that, to find society well organized, we must go back to antiquity, or take 1789 as the place of departure.

To refute these assertions, we will first say that, in regard to antiquity, they forget that it was devoured by the frightful cancer of slavery; among the greater part of nations before Christ, the workmen were for a long time principally slaves. Manual labor, which was universally despised, was performed by entire nations of slaves, who were paid with lashes of the whip. Thus were built many of the magnificent monuments of the Greeks, and, above all, of the Romans—monuments which they place so far above those of the present. I remember, one beautiful October night in the Eternal City, contemplating with stupefaction the immense mass of the Coliseum; the gigantic shafts of the columns which lay pell-mell at my feet; the colossal aqueducts defined against the horizon—all the splendors which are still grand even in their ruins. A priest who accompanied me exclaimed, in astonished admiration, “You must acknowledge that the Christian races have never produced such great works.”

“‘Tis true,” I replied, “and I thank God for it; for these monuments you behold were chiefly constructed by the hands of slaves, and we now only employ free workmen, whom we pay for their labor.”

We do not sufficiently reflect on this. Obelisks, immense pyramids, splendid porticos, hippodromes where so much plebeian blood flowed; theatres where modesty was brutally violated; temples where they adored so many passions, so many vices; tombs where so much vanity is revealed; elegant houses, but where the wife and child were so little valued; astonishing monuments of incomparable art, I admire you much less since I know by whose hands you were raised. It is not thus that they have built since the advent of Jesus Christ and the church.

There is in history a proposition of more than mathematical clearness, which I declare solemnly to be true; it is that the church destroyed slavery. It is the church that gradually transformed the slave into the serf; that by degrees compelled society, formed by her, to change the serf into the freeman. This is established by the records, century after century, year after year, day after day. It is true, the church did not improvise in an hour this admirable change, this marvellous progress; it is not her custom to improvise, and, truth to say, she improvises nothing; she moves slowly but surely. She never roused the slaves to revolt, but she recalled the masters to their duty. She gave great care to the question of marriage between slaves; for, with intelligent foresight, she knew that the whole future depended on it: briefly, in 300, there were millions of slaves—in 1000, not one.

Everywhere existed admirable confraternities of workmen, who worked without pay on the numerous cathedrals scattered throughout Europe; thousands of men labored gratuitously for God, or nobly earned their living in working for their brothers. Will you deny this fact? I defy you to do it. The church conquered for the workmen two inappreciable things—liberty and dignity; and, for so many benefits, she too often receives but ingratitude and forgetfulness. One day, while rambling through the wide streets of Oxford, that city of twenty-four colleges, formerly founded by the church, and which live to-day on those foundations of our fathers, I inquired if there could be found a Catholic Church. I was conducted into a kind of room, narrow and low, which many of your employers would not use for a factory or shop. That was what they condescended to lease the holy church of God in the splendid city, built with her hands, and bathed in her sweat. It is thus with the working-class, which is also a creation of the church; its mother is forgotten, and it is with difficulty that she is left a little corner in the workshop; but it is there we will endeavor to replace her with honor, and then each one of you can say with the poet Jasmin: “I remember that, when I was young, the church found me naked, and clothed me; now that I am a man, I find her naked, in my turn I will cover her.” It is this cry we wish to hear from you.

Again, we hear that “the church is not the same to the rich and to the poor.” When will it be proved, when can it be shown, that there are two Creeds, two Decalogues, two codes of morality, two families of sacraments, two dogmas, two disciplines, two altars—one for the use of the great ones of the earth, the other destined for the poor? It can never be done. They can bring forward a certain number of facts; they can cite abuses more or less deplorable, and which we condemn implacably; but the equality remains entire. I go further, and affirm that the church has unceasingly favored the humble, the weak, and the laborers. They are her privileged ones, and she has well shown it.

Another objection current among the working-class, another calumny which has triumphed over the minds of the people, unworthily deceived, is the scandalous assertion that “the church is the enemy of instruction,” and this abominable falsehood is, above all, applied to primary instruction. Now, it is mathematically proved that, before the establishment of the church, there did not exist in the much-lauded antiquity a single school for workmen. This first proposition is clearly evident, and it is not less mathematically demonstrated that, since the advent of the church, “free schools have been attached to each parish, and confided to the direction of the clergy.” Such are the words of a learned man of our day, who has best appreciated this question, and who, in order to establish his conclusion, appeals to texts the most luminously authentic.[201] We will not pause here to speak of the profound love of Christ for the ignorant—that love which shines forth in every page of the Gospel; nor will we linger over the epoch of the persecution of the early church; but we will transport ourselves to France in the first period of our history.

At the commencement of the VIth century, the Council of Vaison declares that for a long time in Italy “the priests had brought up young students in their own houses, and instructed them like good fathers in faith and sound knowledge.” In the year 700, a Council of Rouen goes further, and commands all Christians to send their children to the city school: is not that instruction Christianly free and Christianly obligatory? Meanwhile, Charlemagne appears, and watches energetically that these noble lights shall not be extinguished, or that they may be relighted. In 797, a capitulary of Theodulph offers these admirable words: “That the priests should establish schools in the villages and boroughs, and that no pay should be exacted from the children in return.” The same decrees are found in the canons of the Council of Rome in 826, in the bulls of Pope Leo IV., and in the capitulary of Hérard, Archbishop of Tours, in 858.

Observe that these last quotations belong to the darkest, most savage epoch of our history. Feudalism reigned supreme; that redoubtable institution had recently come into existence, without having yet at its side the Christian counterpoise of chivalry. But if we make a leap of two or three hundred years, and arrive at the XIIth and XIIIth centuries, all becomes brilliant, and history can furnish the list of all the schools that then existed even in the smallest villages. These statistics are extant, and can be consulted; and from so many accumulated documents, which extend from 529 to 1790, the conclusion, rigorously scientific, must be drawn that “from a distant period, even at the foundation of our parishes, the clergy in the country dispensed instruction to the agricultural classes. It was thus throughout the middle ages; and even at a recent epoch we have seen the priests in many parishes perform the functions of teachers.”[202] What do our adversaries think of such exact testimony? All the schools, then, having been founded by the church, what satanic skill was needed to persuade the people that the church had not established one!

Still more scandalous is the objection that the church has failed in her errand of mercy; for they accuse her of not having sufficiently loved the poor and abandoned. We were stupefied, several years ago, to find this strange assertion in a celebrated review: that the church owed to the Protestants the idea of the Sisters of Charity. Now, we have before our eyes acts truly innumerable, establishing clearly that there were many thousand institutions of charity in France in the XIIth and XIIIth centuries. During the first ages of the church, in the midst of the persecution, the poor, all poor, were assisted in their homes by the deacons; and, after the persecutions, these same poor were reunited in splendid palaces, which were divided into as many classes as there were miseries to relieve. But for the fear of being called pedants, we would cite here the Bretotrophia, or asylums for children; the Nosocomia, or houses for the sick; the Orphanotrophia, reserved for orphans; and the Gerontocomia, consecrated to old age.

Such establishments continued to exist from the XIIth and XIIIth centuries in all the episcopal cities, in the monastic centres, and in the humblest parishes, where they never ceased, during the Christian ages, to soothe the suffering, feed the hungry, counsel the erring, and instruct the ignorant. By these we are easily led to the XIVth and XVth centuries, when we behold so many hospitals, so many charitable institutions, flourishing on the surface of the Christian soil. Where are the tears the church has not dried? the nakedness she has not covered? the captives she has not redeemed? the sick she has not visited? the strangers she has not received? the dead she has not buried with her tears? the sinners she has not pressed to her heart? the children she has not made smile, and has not instructed and consoled? the laborers she has not loved? This is a blow to error and misrepresentation; the proofs are clear—you can, you must read them.

Again, they object that “the church does not occupy herself at the present time with the social, the labor question.” I can show a hundred books, bearing the greatest Catholic names, entirely consecrated to this new science. For eighteen hundred years, the church has not ceased for an instant to put political economy into action; for she has not ceased an instant to lean towards all miseries to relieve them; towards all enjoyments to purify them. Without ever having regarded sacrifice and resignation as the last solution of the social problem; without ever having renounced the hope of seeing the reign of God in a happier future, she has never ceased to preach resignation to the weak, and sacrifice to the powerful. For eighteen hundred years, the church has also written her economical theory; for, on account of the intimate connection between the social question and theology, it can be said with all truth that, up to the XIXth century, there have been as many books written of political economy as treatises of theology.

Thanks be to God, the day has arrived when a science has been founded entirely consecrated to the study of the social question. Far from recoiling before it, the church has valiantly advanced to the charge. Undoubtedly she has a hundred other works on hand, and is obliged to choose the hour when she commences the task; the hour has sounded in this same house, where you listen to me with so much patience; every Monday a modest council is held, which also wishes to take the name of Jésus-Ouvrier. From all parts of Paris come representatives of the religious orders, and for that they joyfully sacrifice every occupation; they occupy themselves with the labor question and the workman. These meetings last two, three, and even four hours. They seek to study the principles which govern this question; the history of the efforts that have been made until the present day in favor of the workman; the obstacles which oppose the solution of this grand problem; and, finally, the remedies which can be brought to bear upon these accumulated evils. This is what is done by these priests, these religious, these Catholics; they will review one after the other the workman, the workingman’s family, the workingman’s association. This is the plan of the book whose materials they are gathering; these are the three parts of a species of theology of labor which they are preparing in concert. In twenty other places in Paris are held twenty other assemblies, not less Catholic, animated by the same spirit, pursuing the same end; and we can now say that the principle of Catholic social economy is erected.

I will now conclude, and throw a last glance over the space we have traversed together. I commenced with the cross, and will finish with it.

In one of our romances of chivalry, it is related that the wood of the cross borne in front of the Christian army in a battle against the Saracens suddenly assumed gigantic and miraculous proportions; it touched the sky, and was more luminous than the sun. The infidels, seized with terror, broke and fled, and the Christians counted another victory. The cross of the Circles of Workingmen is small, very small, and will not probably be the subject of such a prodigy; nevertheless, I hope that its gentle light will end by assuring the victory; and the victory that we desire is that the workman may be thrown in the arms of Jesus Christ.

---

[THE TEMPLE.]

“Know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost?”—1 Cor. vi. 19.

Come, I have found a temple where to dwell:
Sealed up and watched by spirits day and night;
Behind the veil there is a crystal well;
The glorious cedar pillars sparkle bright,
All gemmed with big and glistening drops of dew
That work their way from out yon hidden flood
By mystic virtue through the fragrant wood,
Making it shed a faint, unearthly smell;
And from beneath the curtain that doth lie
In rich and glossy folds of various hue,
Soft showers of pearly light run streamingly
Over the checkered floor and pavement blue.
Oh! that our eyes might see that fount of grace!
But none hath entered yet his own heart’s holy place.

—Faber.

---

[AN EVENING IN CHAMBLY.]

Some years ago, upon occasion of a visit to Rev. F. Mignault, at Chambly, we were most agreeably surprised to meet an old and valued friend whom we had not seen or even heard from for many years. We had known him as a Protestant physician in Upper Canada, and our surprise was none the less to see him now in the habit of a Catholic priest.

After the first salutations, tea was served, when we all withdrew to the cosey parlor of our reverend host—which none can ever forget who have once participated in its genial warmth, and inhaled the kindly atmosphere of its old-time hospitality—and settled ourselves for a long winter evening of social delight.

Our chat was opened by eager inquiries of the friend, whom we had known as Dr. Morris, touching the change in his religion and profession. After some hesitation, and smiling at the urgency of our request for his narrative, he complied, saying:

“Should the tale tire you, let this challenge stand

For my excuse.”

My medical course was completed in a Scotch university, at an earlier age than was usual with students of the profession.

Immediately after receiving my diploma, I joined a colony of my countrymen who were leaving for the wild regions of Upper Canada. After our arrival, not relishing the rough life in “the bush,” I decided to settle in the little village of Brockville, instead of remaining with the colony.

During the progress of the last war between Great Britain and the United States, I had a professional call to go up the St. Lawrence, a two days’ journey.

It was a glorious morning in June when, having accomplished the object of my visit, I set out on my return trip. I was then a stranger to that region, and, attracted by the peculiar beauty of the scenery on the river, I determined to leave the dusty highway, and enjoy a stroll along its banks for a few miles. Accordingly, dismissing my man with the carriage, and directing him to await my arrival at a little inn some miles below, I turned my steps towards the majestic stream, whose flowing waters and wide expanse formed a leading feature of the charming landscape before me, and an appropriate finish or boundary upon which the eye rested with ever-increasing satisfaction and delight.

I had loitered on, absorbed in contemplation of the shifting scene, pausing occasionally to watch the changes wrought by the wing of the passing zephyr as it touched the polished mirror here and there, leaving a ripple more like a magic shadow upon its surface than any ruffling of its peaceful bosom, and peering into its abysses, with the eye of an eager enthusiast, to see—

“Within the depths of its capacious breast
Inverted trees, and rocks, and azure skies,”

lulled, the while, by the blissful consciousness of present beauty, to forget that—

“Garry’s hills were far remote,

The streams far distant of my native glens”—

over the thoughts of which my homesick spirit was but too prone to brood.

I had reached a close thicket of low bushes that skirted the water’s edge, when my steps were suddenly arrested by a rustling sound a little in advance of me. Peeping cautiously through the leafy screen of my secure hiding-place, I saw what seemed to my excited fancy more like an apparition from another world than aught that belonged to this. Upon the gentle slope of a hill which descended to the water, and close upon the bank, stood a gigantic tree that threw its shadows far into the stream, and at the foot of it sat a youthful maiden with a book in her hand, the rustling leaves of which had first attracted my attention. She seemed at times to pore intently over its pages, and at others to be lost in reverie, while her eyes roamed anxiously up and down the river.

As she reclined on the bank, her slight form enveloped in the cloud-like folds of a white morning-dress, it was easy to imagine her the Undine of those wild solitudes, conning the mystic page that was unfolding to her the mysterious lore, hidden from mortal ken, through which the power of her enchantments should be gained and exercised. While I gazed with admiring wonder upon the serene intelligence and varying light which played about her fair features, and rested like a glory upon her uplifted brow, I was surprised by the soft tones of a voice proceeding from the tangled underwood that clothed the upward sweep of the hill: “Sits the pale-face alone on this bright summer morning?”

“O Magawiska! how you startled me, breaking so suddenly upon my dreams! I was indeed sitting alone under the shade of this old tree, pondering over a page in history; counting the white sails far up and down among the Thousand Islands; watching the boiling whirlpools in the waters of our dear old St. Lawrence; and thinking of more things than I should care to enumerate, when your voice broke the spell, and disenchanted me. How is it, Magawiska, that my sisters of the wilderness always approach so softly, taking us, as it were, unawares?”

“In that, we do but follow the example given by all things which the Great Spirit has created to inhabit the forest. But come away with me, my White Dove, to the wigwam. That page in history is turned, and strong hands are even now writing the next one in letters of blood! Many a white sail has glanced through the mazes of the Thousand Islands that will never thread that fairy dance again, and the waters, so pure below, are already tinged further toward their source with the heart’s blood of many a brave soldier! Let my fair one come away; for old Honey Bee, the medicine-woman, has just returned from Chippewa, and may bring some news of the gallant young captain who commands the Water-witch. Floated not the thoughts of my pale sister to him from the folds of the white sails she was so busy counting?”

“Nonsense, Magawiska! But your words alarm me. Surely the Honey Bee has no bad tidings for me from him you name! What can she know of him?”

“I know not; only I heard her whispering to my mother in the Indian tongue, and was sure she uttered the name of the Lightfoot more than once.”

“Well, I will go with you, and hear whatever news she has for me.”

“Will my sister venture through the Vale of the Spirit-flowers, by crossing which the distance to the wigwam is so greatly shortened?”

“Yes, if you are sure you know the way perfectly; for I have never traversed its dreary depths myself.”

“Never fear! the Dove shall be as safe in the home of the wild bird as in the nest of its mother.” Saying which, the young daughter of the woods glided away over the hill, followed by her fair companion.

As they vanished, I quietly emerged from my hiding-place and followed them at a distance, creeping cautiously along to avoid awakening any sounds in the echoing forests, into which we soon entered, that would reach the quick ear of the young native, and at the same time making a passing note of her appearance. She was quite young and beautiful for one of her race. Her form was very slight and graceful in every motion, while her light, elastic step seemed scarcely to press the tender herbage and moss under her feet in her noiseless course. As she passed along, she ever and anon cast a sly glance over her shoulder, smiling mischievously to see the difficulty with which her companion kept pace with her rapid movements through the tangled recesses of the forest. After descending the opposite side of the hill, they entered the dingle at its base to which the young squaw had alluded. I was startled when I found myself enshrouded in its dim shadows. So faint was the light therein on this cloudless June morning as to make it difficult to realize that the hour was not midnight! I could discern something white upon the ground that I conjectured was mould which had gathered in those damp shades. Upon examining more closely, I found it to be a vegetable growth, embracing in form every variety of wild flowers that abounded in the neighboring woods, but entirely colorless, owing to the total absence of light. I gathered a quantity of these singular “spirit-flowers,” which presented the appearance of transparent crystallizations, hoping to inspect them by the full light of day; but the moment they were exposed to the sun, to my great surprise they melted like snowflakes, leaving only fine fibres, like wet strings, in my hands.[203]

When they reached the wigwam, I secreted myself in a thicket near by, where I could hear the conversation between the old squaw and the beautiful stranger; for having then less knowledge of the Indian character than I afterwards acquired, I could not feel quite safe to leave her so entirely in their power. “Magawiska tells me,” she said, with the blushing hesitation of maidenly reserve, “that you have just returned from a distant voyage, and may know something of events which are taking place far up the wilderness of waters.”

“And if the Honey Bee knows, and should fill your ear with tales of bitterness, would not the pale-face say she was more ready to sting the child she loves than to nourish her with sweetness? No, my White Dove! return to the nest of thy mother, and seek not to hear of ills for which there is no cure!”

“I must know, and I will not go until you have told me!” she vehemently cried. “For the love of heaven! my mother, if you know aught of the Lightfoot, tell me; for I can bear any ills I know better than the dread of those I know not!”

“Even so; if the Bee must wound the heart she would rather die than grieve, even so; the will of the Great Spirit must be done, and may he heal what he has broken! There has been a mighty battle; the foes of thy father are the victors. The Water-witch went down in the midst of the fight. The Lightfoot was known to be on deck and wounded when it sank. Thy father is maddened at the triumph of his foes, but rejoices over the fall of him whom he hated for his bravery in their cause, for his religion, and for the love the young brave had won from the only daughter of the old man’s heart and home.”

How my bosom throbbed in painful sympathy with the moans and stifled sobs that burst from the young heart, crushed under the weight of this series of dire calamities, knowing that no human aid or pity could avail for its relief! After some time, she whispered faintly: “Is there, then, no hope for the poor broken heart, so suddenly bereft of its betrothed? Oh! tell me, my good mother of the wilderness, is there no possibility that he may have escaped? If I could but see him, and hear his gentle voice utter one assurance of constancy and affection, even if it were his last, I think I could be reconciled. But this terrible, unlooked-for parting! Say, mother, may he not have escaped? May I not see him once again in life?”

“The hand of the Great Spirit is powerful to heal as to bruise! Since it was not raised to protect and snatch thy beloved from death when no other could have saved him, look to it alone, my child, for the comfort thou wilt seek elsewhere in vain! Were there not hundreds of my brethren who would gladly have given their heart’s blood for the life that was dearer than their own, and had been offered in many conflicts to shield them and theirs from danger? I tell thee, pale daughter of a cruel foe, that wailing and lamentation went up from the camp of the red men when the eyes of its fiercest warriors were melted to women’s tears at the sight I have told thee of!”

Nothing more was said, and soon after the young stranger departed, accompanied by Magawiska.

A few days later, I was summoned in the night to attend upon a wounded soldier on the American shore of the St. Lawrence. I entered a bark canoe with a tall Indian, whose powerful arm soon impelled the light vessel across the broad, swift stream. After landing, he conducted me into a dense and pathless forest, through which I had extreme difficulty in making my way with sufficient speed to keep within ear-shot of my guide. To see him was out of the question; the interlaced and overhanging foliage, though the moon was shining, excluded every ray of light, so that my course was buried in bewildering darkness. A long and fatiguing tramp through the woods brought us at length to a cluster of wigwams, and I was conducted to the most spacious one—the lodge of the “Leader of Prayer”—where I found a remarkably fine-looking young officer lying, faint from loss of blood and the fatigue of removal. A Catholic missionary, whom I had frequently met by the bedside of the sick, and in the course of his journeys from one encampment to another of his Indian missions, was sitting by him, bathing his hands and face in cold water, and whispering words of encouragement and consolation during every interval of momentary consciousness.

From him I learned that the Indians from the scene of action up the lake had brought the wounded man thus far on the way to his friends, at his earnest request. So anxious was he to reach home that he would not consent to stop for rest after they left their boat, although the increased motion renewed the bleeding of the wound, which had been partially checked, until he was so far exhausted as to become wholly unconscious, when they halted here, having brought him through the woods on a litter. The priest had given him some restoratives, but had been unable to check the flow of blood, which was fast draining the vital current. He had administered the last sacraments to the young man, who belonged to a family of Catholics who had recently removed from Utica to a new settlement on the borders of Black Lake.

I made a hasty examination, and soon discovered the position of the bullet. I succeeded in extracting it, after which the bleeding was speedily and in a great measure staunched.

From the moment I looked upon him, however, I regarded his recovery as more than doubtful. Had the case received earlier attention, and the fatigue of removal been avoided, there was a possibility that youthful energy might have carried him through the severe ordeal; though the wound would have been critical under the most favorable circumstances.

When he became conscious for a moment during the operation, and looked in my face, he comprehended the office I was performing, and read in my countenance the fears and doubts which possessed my mind.

“Do not leave me, doctor, until all is over,” he faintly said. “This reverend father will acquaint my friends with my fate, for he knows them.”

I assured him I would remain with him, and he relapsed into the stupor which I feared would be final.

We watched by him with silent solicitude. While the priest was deeply absorbed over the pages of his breviary, my thoughts wandered from the painful present back to the dear old land from which I was a lonely, homesick exile; to bright scenes of the past, fond memories of which neither time nor absence could obliterate, and drew a vivid contrast between them and the circumstances of my new life, especially at this hour. What would the dear friends with whom I had parted for ever think if they could see me in the midst of this wild and dismal scene, surrounded by the rudest features of savage life? With what dismay would they not listen to the howling of wolves and the shrieking of catamounts in the woods around us? How sadly would the continually repeated plaint of the “whippoorwill” fall upon their ear; while, to heighten the gloomy effect of the weird concert, the echoing forests resounded with the shrill notes of the screech-owl, answered, as if in derision, by their multitudinous laughing brothers, whose frantic “Ha! ha! ha!” seemed like the exulting mockery of a thousand demons over the anxious vigil in that Indian wigwam. I was gloomily pursuing this train of thought, when a slight movement near the entrance of the lodge arrested my attention, and aroused me from my reverie. Turning my eye in that direction, I perceived by the dim light the form of old Honey Bee entering softly, accompanied by a female, in whom, as she approached the wounded man and the light fell upon her face, I recognized, to my astonishment, the Undine of my former adventure. But, oh! the change a few short days had wrought in that fair face! The very lineaments had been so transformed from their radiant expression of careless joy to the settled pallor and marble-like impress of poignant anguish that I could scarcely bring myself to believe it was the same.

Calmly she approached and knelt by the sufferer, taking his hand and bowing her fair forehead upon it. Thus she remained for some time in speechless agony, when my ears caught the whispered prayer: “O my God! if there is pity in heaven for a poor broken heart, let him look upon me once more! Let me hear his gentle voice once again!” Then, placing her mouth to his ear, she said clearly, in a low, pleading tone:

“Will you not speak to me once again, my own betrothed?”

Slowly, as if by a painful effort, the drooping eyelids lifted the long lashes from his cheek, and his eyes rested with unutterable tenderness upon the pale face which was bending over him. “Oh! speak to me! Say if you know me!” she pleaded, with convulsive earnestness.

Repeatedly did the colorless lips vainly essay to speak, and at length the words were wrenched from them, as it were, in broken sentences, by the agonized endeavor:

“My own, my best beloved! May God bless and comfort you! I leave you with him! He is good to the living and the dying. Trust in him, my own love, and he will never fail you. I am going to him, but I will pray for you ever, ever!” Then, with another strong effort, while a sweet smile stole over the features upon which death had set his seal, “Tell your father I forgive all!” A gurgling sound—a faint gasp—and the light went out from the large dark eyes, the hand which had held hers relapsed its grasp, and, before the holy priest had closed the prayers for the departing spirit, all was over!

It was the old, old story, repeated again and again, alike in every village and hamlet, on the bosom of old ocean, in the city and in the wilderness, through all the ages since the angel of death first spread his wings over a fallen world, and carried their dark shadow into happy homes, banishing the sunlight, leaving only the cloud. The same story, “ever ancient and ever new,” which will be repeated again and again for every inhabitant of earth until “time shall be no longer,” yet will always fall with new surprise upon the ears of heart-stricken survivors, as if they had never before heard of its dread mysteries! Thank God that it closes for those souls whose loved ones “rest in hope” with consolations that become, in time, ministering angels over life’s dark pathway, smoothing the ruggedness, lighting up the gloom, even unto the entrance of the valley whose shadows are those of death, and supporting them with tender aid through the dread passage.

Long did we remain in a silence broken only by bitter sobs pressed from the bleeding heart of that youthful mourner. One by one the Indians, each with his rosary in his hand, had entered noiselessly and reverently knelt, until the lodge was filled with a pious and prayerful assemblage.

In the course of my profession, I had witnessed many death-bed scenes, but had never become so familiar with the countenance of the pallid messenger as to be a mere looker-on. A sense of the “awfulness of life” deepened upon me with each repetition of the vision of death. But I had never before been present at one that so entirely melted my whole being as this—so striking in all the attributes of wild and touching pathos!

God forgive me! I had hitherto lived without a thought of him or his requirements, and wholly indifferent to all religion. My life, though unstained by vice, had been regulated by no religious motives, and, so far as any interest in religion was in question, beyond a certain measure of decent outward respect, I might as well have claimed to be a pagan as a Christian. I resolved by that death-bed, while I held the cold hand of that lifeless hero in mine, and mingled my tears with those of the broken-hearted mourner, that it should be so no longer! Then and there I resolved to begin a new life, and offered myself to God and to his service in whatever paths it should please his hand to point out to me.

As the morning dawned, old Honey Bee, with gentle persuasions and affectionate urgency, drew the afflicted maiden away, and I saw her no more. I assisted the good priest to prepare the remains of the young officer for the removal, which he was to conduct, and then sought his advice and guidance in my own spiritual affairs, freely opening to him the history of my whole life. After receiving such directions as I required, and promising to see him again soon at Brockville, I returned by the way I went, and never revisited that vicinity.

Some weeks later, I was called to the residence of a well-known British officer, a leader of the Orangemen in Upper Canada, to attend a consultation with several older physicians upon the case of his daughter, who was lying in a very alarming state with a fever. Upon entering the apartment of the patient, I was again surprised to discover in this victim of disease the lovely mourner of that sad scene in the wilderness. She lay in a partial stupor, and, when slightly roused, would utter incoherent and mysterious expressions connected with the events of that night, and painful appeals, which were understood by none but myself, who alone had the key to their meaning.

If I had formerly been amazed to see the change a few days had accomplished, how much more was I now shocked at the ravages wrought by sorrow and disease! Could it be possible that the shrivelled and hollow mask before me represented the fair face that had been so lately blooming in beauty—shining with the joy of a glad and innocent heart?

The anguish of her haughty father was pitiful to see! Determined not to yield to the pressure of a grief which was crushing his proud spirit, his effort to maintain a cool and dignified demeanor unsustained by any aid, human or divine, was a spectacle to make angels weep. Alas! for the heart of poor humanity! In whatever petrifactions of paltry pride it may be encrusted, there are times when its warm emotions will burst the shell, and assert their own with volcanic power! When the attending physician announced the result of the consultation, in the unanimous opinion that no further medical aid could be of any avail, he stalked up and down the room for some time with rapid strides; then, pausing before me, and fixing his bloodshot eyes on my face, exclaimed violently, “It is better so! I tell you, it is better even so, than that I should have seen her married to that Yankee Jacobin and Papist! At least, I have been spared that disgrace! But my daughter! Oh! she was my only one; peerless in mind, in person, and in goodness; and must she die? Ha! it is mockery to say so! It cannot be that such perfection was created only to be food for worms! As God is good, it may not, shall not, be!”

While he was uttering these frantic exclamations, a thought struck me like an inspiration. The image of old Honey Bee arose suddenly before my mind. I remembered that she had gained the reputation among the settlers of performing marvellous cures in cases of this kind by the use of such simples as her knowledge of all the productions of the fields and forests and their medicinal properties had enabled her to obtain and apply.

Therefore, when the haughty officer paused, I ventured to suggest to his ear and her mother’s only, that the Indian woman might possibly be able to make such applications as might at least alleviate the violence of the painful and alarming symptoms. He was at first highly indignant at the proposal of even bringing one of that hated race into his house, much less would he permit one to minister to his daughter. But when I respectfully urged that she be brought merely as a nurse, in which vocation many of her people were known to excel, and which I had known her to exercise with great skill in the course of my practice, failing not to mention her love and admiration for the sufferer, the entreaties of the sorrow-stricken, anxious mother were joined with mine, and prevailed to obtain his consent. I was requested to remain until she should arrive. Nothing was said of the matter to the other physicians, who soon took their leave.

When the old friend of the hapless maiden arrived, she consented to take charge of the case only upon condition that she should be left entirely alone with the patient, and be permitted to pursue her own course without interruption or interference. It was difficult to bring the imperious officer to these terms; but my confidence in the fidelity of the old squaw, and increasing assurance that the only hope of relief for the sufferer lay in the remedies she might use, combined with the prayers of her mother, won his reluctant consent, if I could be permitted to see his daughter daily, and report her condition. This I promised to do, and found no difficulty in obtaining the permission of the new practitioner to that effect.

Whether the presence of a sympathizing friend assisted the treatment pursued I do not know. There are often mysterious sympathies and influences whose potency baffles the wisdom of philosophers and the researches of science. Certain it is that, to my own astonishment, no less than to that of the gratified parents, there was a manifest improvement in the condition of their daughter from the hour her new nurse undertook the charge.

In a few weeks, the attendance of old Honey Bee was no longer necessary. The joy and gratitude of the father knew no bounds. He would gladly have forced a large reward upon her for services which had proved so successful, but she rejected it, saying: “The gifts that the Great Spirit has guided the Honey Bee to gather are not the price of silver and gold. Freely he gives them; as freely do his red children dispense them. They would scorn to barter the lore he imparts for gold. Enough that the daughter of the white chief lives. Let him see that he quench not the light of her young life again in his home!”

“What does she mean?” he muttered, as she departed. “Does she know? But no, she cannot; it must be some surmise gathered from expressions of my daughter in her delirium.”

In accordance with my promise, I had called daily during the attendance of the Indian woman, who found opportunity, from time to time, to explain to me the circumstances attending the rescue of the Lightfoot.

The Indians, by whom he was greatly beloved, supposed, when they saw his vessel go down, that he was lost, as they knew him to have been badly wounded. A solitary Indian from another detachment was a witness of the catastrophe while he was guiding his canoe in a direction opposite to that of the encampment, and on the other side of the scene of action. He dashed at once with his frail bark into the midst of the affray, to render assistance, if possible, to any who might have escaped from the ill-fated vessel. While he was watching, to his great joy he saw the young officer rise to the surface, and was able to seize and draw him into the canoe. As he was passing to the shore, he was noticed by the father of the officer’s betrothed, and the nature of his prize discovered. A volley of musketry was immediately directed upon the canoe, and the Indian received a mortal wound. He was so near the shore that he was rescued by his party, but died soon after landing.

I told her that I had heard the remainder of the story from the missionary at the wigwam.

She then informed me that, after she came to take charge of the maiden, as soon as her patient became sufficiently conscious to realize her critical condition, she had implored so piteously that the priest might be sent for that it was impossible to refuse. When he came—privately, of course, for it was too well known that her father would never consent to such a visit—she entreated permission to profess the Catholic faith without delay. After some hesitation, the priest consented when he found her well instructed in its great and important truths, heard her confession, her solemn profession of faith, and administered conditional baptism; following the rite by the consoling and transcendent gift which is at once the life and nourishment of the Catholic soul and the sun of the Catholic firmament.

The squaw dreaded the violence of her father when he should discover what had transpired, and enjoined it upon me to shield the victim, if possible, from the storm of his wrath. Alas! she little dreamed how powerless I should prove in such a conflict!

Before the strength of the invalid was established, that discovery was made. I had known much of the unreasoning bigotry and black animosity which was cherished by the Orange faction against Catholics; but I was still wholly unprepared for his savage outbreak. He heaped curses upon his daughter’s head, and poured forth the most bitter and blasphemous lamentations that she had been permitted to live only to bring such hopeless disgrace upon his gray hairs.

Despite the mother’s tears and prayers, he ordered her from the house, and forbade her ever to return or to call him father again. Once more did old Honey Bee come to the rescue of her protégée. Her affectionate fears had made her vigilant, and, when the maiden was driven from her father’s house, she was received and conducted to a wigwam which had been carefully prepared for her reception. Here she was served with the most tender assiduity until able to be removed to Montreal, whither her kind nurse attended her, and she entered at once upon her novitiate in a convent there.

The day after her departure, I also took my leave of that part of the country, and, proceeding to a distant city, entered the ecclesiastical state. In due time, I was ordained to the new office of ministering to spiritual instead of physical ills, my vocation to which was clearly made known to me by that death-bed in the wilderness.

And now that I have related to you how the Protestant doctor became a Catholic priest, I must ask, in my turn, how it happened that you and your family became Catholics.

“The story is soon told,” we replied. “Very probably our attention might never have been called to the subject but for a great affliction which was laid upon us in the sufferings of our only and tenderly cherished daughter. She was blest with rosy health until her tenth year, and a merrier little sprite the sun never shone upon.

“Suddenly disease in its most painful and hopeless form fastened itself upon her, and, while sinking under its oppressive weight, she felt more and more deeply day by day, with a thoughtfulness rapidly matured by suffering, the necessity for such aid and support as Protestantism failed to furnish. It was, humanly speaking, by a mere accident that she discovered where it might be found.

“During an interval between the paroxysms of the disease, and a little more than a year after the first attack, a missionary priest visited our place, and her Catholic nurse obtained our permission to take her to the house of a neighbor where Mass was to be celebrated.

“She was deeply impressed with what she saw, and the fervent address of that devoted and saintly priest melted her young heart. She obtained from him a catechism and some books of devotion. From that time her conviction grew and strengthened that here was the healing balm her wounded spirit so much needed. After long persuasion and many entreaties, we gave our reluctant consent that she might avail herself of its benefits by making profession of the Catholic faith. To the sustaining power of its holy influences we owe it that her life, from which every earthly hope had been stricken, was made thenceforth so happy and cheerful as to shed perpetual sunshine over her home and its neighborhood.

“By degrees she drew us, at first unwillingly, and at length irresistibly, to the consideration of Catholic verities. Through the grace of God operating upon these considerations, our whole family, old and young, were soon united within the peaceful enclosure of the ‘household of faith.’

“When the work of our dear little missionary was thus happily accomplished, she was removed from the home for which she had been the means of procuring such priceless blessings to that other and better home, the joys of which may not even be imagined here. With grateful hearts we have proved and realized that for those whom God sorely afflicts his bountiful hand also provides great and abundant consolations.”

---

[THE STORIES OF TWO WORLDS:]

MIDDLEMARCH AND FLEURANGE.

Between the world of Middlemarch and the world of Fleurange there yawns as wide a moral gulf as that which nature has set between the continents. The one is a world with God, the other without. It is not that George Eliot’s story partakes of the characteristics which usually attach to female novelists, with their vague interpretations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments; nor, on the other hand, that Fleurange is in any sense a goody-goody book. But the authors occupying essentially different stand-points, all things naturally wear a different aspect; their characters are subject to a different order; all life has a different meaning; so that, though the subject of each is humanity, its crosses and loads of sorrow and pain, rather than its laughter and gladness; though the men and women breathe the same air, are warmed by the same sun their, faces wet with human tears, their hearts sore with human sorrows; nevertheless, through either book runs an abiding tone felt rather than heard, like an unseen odor pervading the atmosphere, which affects the reader differently throughout. The characters in the one believe in, pray to, love, obey, or rebel against a definite, personal God; the presiding spirit in the other veils his face, and it is not for man to say who he is. The author only sees men and women gathered together in this world—how, they know not; why, it is difficult to conceive—and all we know for certain is that here they are, coming in contact one with the other, increasing, multiplying, and dropping out after each one has added his necessary mite to the immensity of the universe.

There are books and writings which seem rather the production of an age than of any particular author; which seem to take up and gather into one voice the long inarticulate breathing of a portion of humanity, dumb hitherto for want of an oracle. Such were the writings previous to the first French Revolution; such are the songs of Ireland; such, after a certain fashion, is Middlemarch. It is measuring daily life by the favorite doctrines of the day, whose holders profess to see things as they are, and to judge of them purely and solely by what they see, explaining them as best they may. To remind such people that often the visible is the appearance only, the invisible the reality, is to speak to them a language they will not understand.

Middlemarch is a story of English provincial life as English provincial life obtained fifty years ago; at the dawn, that is, practically speaking, of this wonderful XIXth century; before California and Australia had discovered their golden secret, when steam was still in its infancy, electric telegraphs unknown, and the sciences just beginning to take a bolder flight. In England, O’Connell was thundering for Catholic emancipation, and the nation clamoring for that vague thing in the mouth of the masses—reform.

Just as matters were in this chrysalis state, whilst the masses were still undisturbed by the wonders of the century, or, if the phrase is better, not educated up to them, George Eliot settles down in that dullest of places, an English provincial district, to give us

“The story of its life from year to year.”

The story covers very extensive ground; all Middlemarch, in fact, with its parishes and towns, its churches and taverns, its clergy and magistrates, its physicians and shopkeepers, its gentry and its yokels, its good men and its rascals, its maidens young and old, its loves and its hates, its hopes and its fears, its marriages and deaths, its thoughts, words, and deeds, from high to low—such is the broad scope of the book, and the author has gathered all in in a manner to make the reader wonder. Nothing has escaped her eye. One seems to have been living in Middlemarch all his life, and every character comes and goes with the face of an old acquaintance. It is not the author’s fault if the district be a narrow one—narrow, that is, in ideas, in knowledge, in faith, in all that ennobles man. It is not her fault if its great ideas take the shape of “keys to all mythologies”; if its religion is a poor affair at the best; if its leading men are religious hypocrites like Mr. Bulstrode, or philanthropic asses like Mr. Brooke, who “goes in” for everything, and talks the broadest and vaguest philanthropy whilst he pinches his tenants. It is not the author’s fault if generosity find no place in Middlemarch; if honesty is misunderstood or at a discount; if the local physicians throw discredit upon Lydgate with his youth, his burning desire to achieve, his cleverness, and his genuine enthusiasm; if they call his ideas quackery, because they threaten their pockets, as the yokels in turn look upon the railway as destruction, and hold that steam takes the handle from the plough and the pitchfork; as Middlemarch receives Dorothea Brooke’s generous aspirations after a higher life than that which, in response to the question of an ardent nature, “What can I do?” says, “Whatever you please, my dear”—as “notions” which are wrong in themselves, because undreamed of in Middlemarch philosophy, which, in Miss Brooke are odd, and which, if carried a little farther, would find their fitting sphere of action in the lunatic asylum.

It is not the author’s fault if all this be so; if there be nothing in Middlemarch beyond the common good, and very little even of that, whilst all the rest is mean, sordid, crooked, narrow, and outspokenly wicked. Such is Middlemarch, and such is it given to us. The only question is, How far does Middlemarch extend? Is it restricted to the English county, or is it a miniature photograph of the world as seen by George Eliot?

In the keynote to the whole book, the prelude, the author cries out bitterly that in this world and in these days there is no place for a S. Teresa. In this assertion, in this wail rather, the author does not limit her district to Middlemarch. It is a doctrine meant to apply to the broad world. Throughout the book the same thing is to be observed. Though with wonderful consistency and truth of local coloring, and continual recurrence of petty local questions and local ideas, the author keeps the reader in Middlemarch from beginning to end, nevertheless, whether with or without intention, from time to time she strikes out with broader aim, and flings her sarcasm, or her observation, or her moral, such as it may be, in the face of humanity.

Therefore, though it would be unfair to infer that George Eliot’s views of the world, its possibilities, its hopes, its all that makes it what it is, are confined to the cramped, narrow, provincial district chosen as the subject of her story; to allege that she believes in nothing nobler now in humanity than what Middlemarch affords; yet so wide is the district embraced, so various the subjects entered into, not merely touched upon—religion, politics, the bettering of the poor, marriage, preparation for the married state, and the effect of such preparation on married life, the thousand conflicts that meet, and jostle, and combine to make everyday life what it is—it is not unfair to say that the author, in drawing within this somewhat narrow circle the main elements which compose humanity, has taken Middlemarch up as a scientist would take a basin of water from the sea to examine it—not for the sake of that sample only, but with a view to the whole.

The chief interest of the story, if story it can be called, lies in this: From the outstart, the author warns you that a S. Teresa has no place in the world now; and, to prove that her warning is correct, she takes up a character, Dorothea Brooke, endows her with the aspirations after a great life, fits her naturally, as far as she can, with every attribute, physical and moral, which she considers a S. Teresa ought to possess; with religious feelings, with the continual desire to do good, with charity, with purity, with the spirit of self-sacrifice, with simplicity, and truth, and utter unconsciousness of self, with wealth enough even, as the author says of Mr. Casaubon, “to lend a lustre to her piety,” and sets her down in the narrow Middlemarch set, where everything runs in a groove, and life is measured by all the pettinesses, to see what will become of her.

The result may as well be told at once. S. Teresa proves a miserable failure in Middlemarch. Instead of marrying, as the world—that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader—had ordained she should do, the handsome, florid, conventional English baronet, Sir James Chettam, a sort of aristocratic “Mr. Toots,” who is so amiable and admires her so much that he brings her triumphs of nature in the shape of marvellous Maltese puppies as presents, and says “exactly” to all her observations, even when she desires him to say the contrary—out of a spirit of religion, self-sacrifice, and veneration, and honestly because she admires the man, or rather the being dressed out to suit by her own imagination, she marries Mr. Casaubon, with his sallow complexion, his moles, his blinking eyes, and his age, which is more than double her own. Unsympathetic to the loving nature of the girl as a wooden doll whose complexion has suffered and whose form is battered by age, but which notwithstanding the girl invests with all the qualities and beauty of a Prince Charming—a deception that time alone and that ugly thing, common sense, can remove—S. Teresa speedily discovers that her “divine Hooker,” as she fondly imagined him, is after all only “a poor creature,” and she is probably saved from the divorce court only by the timely death of the “divine Hooker.” She discovered that she had married the wrong man—exactly what Middlemarch told her; and there lies the provoking part of the story. Middlemarch was right in its degree, and the woman, whose ideas soared so high above it, was all the worse off for not taking its advice at the outstart. S. Teresa repents of her sin, and characteristically atones for it by marrying the right man—at least, the man she loves and who loves her—and is dismissed in the following remarks, which close the book:

“Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age, on modes of education which make a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance, on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly asserted beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea’s life, where great feelings will take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion; for there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Teresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial; the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people, with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of Dorothea whose story we know.

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

George Eliot writes too earnestly to laugh at. Besides, she is not a Catholic—very far from it; and therefore her views of what a S. Teresa is or ought to be must be radically different from those of the church from which S. Teresa sprang, in which she lived, labored, became Saint Teresa, and died. Were a Catholic to have written certain portions of the extract quoted, he would only provoke laughter; but with this author, the case is different.

It never seems to have occurred to her that S. Teresas are not self-made; as little as the prophets were self-made prophets, or the apostles self-made apostles. Neither were they made by the society which surrounded them. The supernatural state of sanctity in its fulness does not spring from humanity merely; else might we have had eras of sanctity as there have been other eras, and there might be truth in George Eliot’s words that there will be no place for a “new Teresa.” Saints are the very opposite to that growing class so glibly dubbed “providential men,” who seem to come from that vast but rather undefined region which goes by the name of “manifest destiny.” The individuals forming that happy class are set willy-nilly by “Providence” in this world to accomplish some destiny—a theory laughed at long ago by one of Mr. Disraeli’s worldly-wise characters in the words, “We make our fortunes, and we call them fate.” What the saints do they do very consciously. Sanctity consists in not being merely blameless in life, but in devoting life to God, and turning every thought, word, and action to him for his sake. The feeling that produces this state of life may be influenced at the beginning by earthly surroundings, may be shaped by good example or wise teachings, but is essentially independent of them. Sanctity comes from a direct call, as direct as the call of the apostles. It knows neither time nor place, and is therefore as possible in the XIXth as in the XVIth or the Ist century. But it is unknown outside of the church, because the head of the church, “Christ Jesus our Lord,” alone has the power to call his children to the sanctified state in this life. And if it be asked, Why, then, does he not call all to be saints here? it is as though one asked, Why did he not call all men to be apostles directly?

George Eliot’s difficulty springs from not knowing precisely what constitutes a saint.

If she only reads the life of S. Teresa, she will find that the saint of her admiration had to encounter a Middlemarch circle even in Catholic Spain. She will find her “young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions”; that she had to stand the brunt of being misunderstood and misrepresented; her schemes of reform, of good works, her noble aspirations and ardent self-sacrifice, set down as “notions.” In fact, the opposition which meets her heroine at every step in her desire to do good and to be perfect, not only to herself but to others, is puny compared with that which S. Teresa had to sustain all through her life.

As a matter of fact, S. Teresa was much more of the ordinary woman than George Eliot, with a novelist’s love, makes her heroine. In her youth, she was subject to all the ordinary fancies of “the sex,” and has left us the record of her vanities, which were neither more nor less than those of ten thousand very excellent ladies living at this moment, who are no more S. Teresas than they are Aspasias; but good Christian women, girls with a happy future before them, or smiling mothers of families. It was not her surroundings which made Teresa a saint: it was her clear conception of duty, which no “prosaic conditions” could dim, and her profound and very definite faith, not in that obscure creation which George Eliot calls “the perfect Right,” but in Jesus Christ, her God.

It was perfectly natural that George Eliot’s Teresa should fail; but the mistake of the author consists in making the failure come from without rather than from within—a mistake easily understood when it is borne in mind that the author has no firm faith, possibly none at all, in Christianity. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, all failed to make the world better, not because they may not have wished it, but because they had not the power. They were themselves uncertain of their schemes. Their highest flights, like those of the best of modern philosophers who possess no faith, never pass beyond intellectual excellence devoid of soul. They may daze the intellect, but they do not touch the soul; and the life of a man is never regulated by pure intellect. So they fail, whilst the ignorant fishermen, who lose their personality in God, move and convert the world.

In taking issue on these fundamental points with the author of Middlemarch, many of the subjects touched upon would require elaborate elucidation when read by those who are not of the Catholic faith. But space does not allow of this, and, therefore, it is to be understood that this article is supposed only to meet the eyes of persons fully acquainted at least with the Catholic manner of looking at things.

Dorothea Brooke fails in becoming a S. Teresa, as the author seems to consider she should have become, not because she has lighted on evil days and on a less congenial set than S. Teresa did, but because, in Catholic phrase, she had no vocation.

To find out what is meant by a vocation, let us anticipate, and turn a moment to Fleurange at that point in the heroine’s history where, having “tasted beforehand the bitter pleasures of sacrifice,” she retires heart-broken to the convent where she spent her youth, to find the rest and peace which seemed banished from the world after the voluntary sacrifice she had made of her affections.

“Mother Maddalena stood with her arms folded, and listened without interrupting her. Standing thus motionless in this place, at this evening hour, the noble outlines of her countenance and the long folds of her robe clearly defined against the blue mountains in the distance and the violet heavens above, she might easily have been mistaken for one of the visions of that country which have been depicted for us and all generations. The illusion would not have been dispelled by the aspect of her who, seated on the low wall of the terrace, was talking with her eyes raised, and with an expression and attitude perfectly adapted to one of those young saints often represented by the inspired artist before the divine and majestic form of the Mother of God.

“‘Well, my dear mother, what do you say?’ asked Fleurange, after waiting a long time, and seeing the Madre looking at her and gently shaking her head without any other reply.

“‘Before answering you,’ replied she at last, ‘let me ask this question: Do you think it allowable to consecrate one’s self to God in the religious life without a vocation?’

“‘Assuredly not.’

“‘And do you know what a vocation is?’ said she very slowly.

“Fleurange hesitated. ‘I thought I knew, but you ask in such a way as to make me feel now I do not.’

“‘I am going to tell you: a vocation,’ said the Madre, as her eyes lit up with an expression Fleurange had never seen before—’a vocation to the religious life is to love God more than we love any creature in the world, however dear; it is to be unable to give anything or any person on earth a love comparable to that; to feel the tendency of all our faculties incline us towards him alone; finally,’ pursued she, while her eyes seemed looking beyond the visible heavens on which they were fastened, ‘it is the full persuasion, even in this life, that he is all, our all, in the past, the present, and the future; in this world and in another, for ever, and to the exclusion of everything besides.’”

The carrying out of this feeling made Teresa a saint. It is doubtful whether such thoughts ever entered into George Eliot’s conception of the character she is continually holding up before her readers as impossible in these days. Certainly Dorothea Brooke, with all her natural goodness, never conceived such a life as that possible. The author may be right in attributing her defects to her Calvinistic education, but that does not warrant the inference that anything higher than a life which merely aims at an uncertain good, capable of influencing those coming within its circle in a certain way, is impossible in these days. When the author speaks of “great faith taking the aspect of illusion,” before conceding, one would like to see the “great faith.” Dorothea Brooke never knew what real faith was; from beginning to end, all is uncertainty with her. From girlhood up she lives in an atmosphere of self-delusion and imagination which can find no other possible vent than aimless aspirations after imaginary perfection, which must come into collision with the rough, practical world, and must finally go to the wall. But when the world sees a man or a woman acting steadily up to a practical belief which guides them in all their actions, and meets every contingency, however unexpected, and every calamity, however great, if it does not fall in and follow, it will at least respect it and acknowledge that there is something in it.

It may sound “a hard saying,” but practically there is no such thing as “ideal beauty”; and those who, like George Eliot, strive after it as the great good, pursue a phantom, a nothing, an emanation of their own imagination, and, like the poet in Shelley’s “Alastor,” waste their life in profitless longings, and when death comes—

“All

Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope,
But pale despair and cold tranquillity.”

Persons of an undefined faith, women particularly, are very much attached to this ideal beauty, and, not finding it in man, are apt to rebel against “prosaic conditions”; and those who regulate their actions by their thoughts find issue in absurdities, often in crime, more or less gross. It would be well for these theorists to remember that man after all has a considerable admixture of clay in his composition, which may explain many of those vulgar but necessary “prosaic conditions”; and until the human race comes to be fed on “vril,” the world must continue to count upon and accommodate itself to a vast amount of flesh-and-blood reality. And a beauty, far higher than any ideal beauty, is visible in the everlasting struggle between spirit and clay. There was no ideal in the death upon the cross, the consummation of Christian sacrifice. All was terribly real there, and flesh suffered as well as mind while a flutter of the spirit remained. Here lies something greater than any ideal—the spirit bracing the flesh, sustaining it when it faints, enabling it to bear all things, not blindly and as coming by fate from the hands of a blind destiny or careless power, but as trials sent from heaven to lead to heaven and prepare for heaven.

That is the fault with Middlemarch. It has all the “prosaic conditions” and nothing else. It wants nothing else; it positively revels in them. And when anything higher comes to it, it sets the higher down as “notions” in religion, or “quackery” in medicine, “or swallowing up” of the little traffic by the big in railroads.

Into these “prosaic conditions” and surroundings the author drops another character similar to that of Dorothea, as far as a man can be similar in nature to a woman, save that his religion consists in the passion for his profession, the ardent aspiration after the glory of achievement, aided by all natural gifts, and strengthened by what have been well called the “pagan virtues.” This is Lydgate, the young physician, a stranger to Middlemarch, who is possessed by the desire common to all young ambition of educating Middlemarch up to a lofty standard, and using it as a lever to move a slow world. Though perhaps as well fitted as man—considered merely as an intellectual animal endowed with Christian instincts, moved by a generous if somewhat impetuous nature, and void of the vices—could be for that purpose, the result in his case is the same as in that of Dorothea. Instead of lifting Middlemarch up to the level of his ideal, he finds himself dragged down to it; and, strangely and perhaps truthfully enough, he finds, in common with Dorothea, that the very being to whom he linked his life is the stumbling-block in the way of his achievement. Dorothea receives a fatal jar to her imaginings in the person of the husband she adored by anticipation. Lydgate finds his nature crushed and resisted at all points by the passive resistance of his wife. The woman is mercifully relieved from her incubus by death; the strong man gives way before his “so charming wife, mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and able to frustrate him by stratagem.”

“Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, ... having written a treatise on gout—a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do. As the years went on, he opposed his wife less and less, whence Rosamond concluded that he had learnt the value of her opinion. In brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man. But he died prematurely of diphtheria. He once called his wife his basil-plant, and, when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.”

Such is the end of the naturally noble man who marries fair Rosamond, “the flower of Middlemarch.” This fair Rosamond, like her historical namesake, lives in a crooked labyrinth of devious ways, where she fetters her knight, her king, who would fain go forth to conquer kingdoms, and, if need be, take her with him. But her kingdom is bounded by her own narrow domain, and she carries him on from labyrinth to labyrinth, till he is lost and resigns himself to his fate.

When the lady who is pleased to assume the name of George Eliot first startled the English reading world, there was great doubt as to the sex of the new author. Certainly all such doubt, if any still existed, would be set at rest for ever by the portrait of Rosamond Vincy. No man could ever have executed that. No man could ever have gone down into the very fibres of a woman’s nature, and drawn them all out one by one, and laid them bare before us, to show what constitutes “that best marble of which goddesses are made.” If Dorothea, with the strong touch of Calvinism leading her noble nature astray, prove a failure, what shall be said of “the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of the carriage”?

Rosamond Vincy is, perhaps, the most finished portrait ever presented of the intelligent animal of the female sex; clever enough to despise Middlemarch, not because it is low, and mean, and sordid, but because it is too narrow and unworthy to hold so fair and accomplished a specimen of humanity as Rosamond Vincy. All young Middlemarch breaks its heart about her. She refuses it quietly and persistently, wins Lydgate in spite of himself, not because he is Lydgate, the generous, ardent, high-souled young man, but because he brings with him the atmosphere of an outer world, with a hint of great relations, a distinguished person, and an unconscious air of superiority which Middlemarch cannot offer. The result of the wedding of two such natures may be imagined. George Eliot’s version of it is horribly real and miserably natural; and perhaps the most powerful part of the book is the struggle going on between the generous nature of the man and the demon of self incarnate in the perfect form and the narrow but acute intellect of the woman, who is so supremely selfish that she is absolutely unconscious of her selfishness, and therefore incurable. “Lydgate,” after vainly endeavoring to break down this barrier which lay between them, invisible to the eyes of her who raised it, “had accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burden of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burden pitifully.”

And she, his “bird-of-paradise,” only once called his “basil-plant,” when the man whose life had been lost on her died, “married an elderly and wealthy physician, who took kindly to her four children. She made a very pretty show with her daughters, driving out in her carriage, and often spoke of her happiness as ‘a reward’—she did not say for what, but probably she meant that it was a reward for her patience with Tertius, whose temper never became faultless, and to the last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was more memorable than the signs he made of his repentance. Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches: Why, then, had he chosen her? It was a pity he had not had Mrs. Ladislaw—Dorothea—whom he was always praising and placing above her.”

With regret the examination into this wonderful book, of which three of the salient characters only have been touched upon, must now close. The story abounds in other characters, each perfect in its way, as far as drawing and execution go. It forms quite a study in parsons as in physicians; and those who quarrel with the author of My Clerical Friends must feel sore aggrieved at the clerical friends of George Eliot. There is not a priestly character among them; not a single devoted man whose heart is given wholly to God, and whose mind is bent solely on doing God’s work for God’s sake. The Middlemarch parsons are a narrow set of men of undefined belief and cramped charity; their belief being measured by their salary, and their charity beginning and often ending at home with their wives and families. The only agreeable characters among them as men are Mr. Cadwallader and Mr. Farebrother. The first of these is a “good, easy man,” whose Gospel is as elastic as his fishing-rod, of whom the author says, “His conscience was large and easy like the rest of him; it did only what it could without any trouble,” and whom his wife characteristically hits off in the sentence that, “as long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is what he ought to be”; whilst she complains: “He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman. What can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies?” The other, Mr. Farebrother, is the best preacher in Middlemarch, and really a man of a noble nature; yet his poverty leads him to play whist for money and even an occasional game of billiards at the Green Dragon. He leads us to infer that he knows he has assumed the wrong profession, but that it is too late to get rid of it.

The only man who really possesses anything in the semblance of religion is Mr. Bulstrode, the Methodist banker, of whom wicked old Featherstone, whose death is so powerfully told, says:

“What’s he? He’s got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of. A speckilating fellow! He may come down any day, when the devil leaves off backing him. And that’s what his religion means: he wants God A’mighty to come in. That’s nonsense! There’s one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go to church, and it’s this: God A’mighty sticks to the land. He promises land, and he gives land, and he makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.” That sounds very like the religion of Tennyson’s Northern Farmer of the new style. As a matter of fact, old Featherstone turns out to be right. Bulstrode is a hypocrite. His life and his fortune have been built upon hypocrisy. He is rich on money that does not belong to him and by wealth ill-gotten; he strives to silence his conscience by a life of external mortification and by works set on foot for the improvement of the poor and carried out in his own way. Yet rather than lose his character for respectability and goodness, he murders an old associate; that is, he consciously does what the physician warned him might cause death.

Mrs. Cadwallader, spite of her wit and her mind, “active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near into the form that suited it,” must be dismissed in her own words, though she is the life of Middlemarch, as one who “set a bad example—married a poor clergyman, and made herself a pitiable object among the De Bracys—obliged to get her coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for her salad-oil”; as must also Ladislaw, whom Mr. Brooke, who takes him up and transfers him to the Pioneer, characterizes as “a kind of Shelley, you know,” whom he (Mr. Brooke) may be able to put on the right tack; who has “a way of putting things,” which is just the sort of thing Mr. Brooke wants—“not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them.” Lydgate characterizes him best as “a likable fellow, but bric-a-brac.” He is just the material out of which Charles Lever constructed “Joe Atlee,” that prince of Bohemians.

It is difficult also to pass unnoticed by the Vincy and the Garth families; thriftless Fred. Vincy, who is only saved from taking to that last resort of an ignoble mind—“the cloth”—by honest Caleb Garth and his merry, true-hearted daughter Mary, who is, perhaps, after all the best and jolliest girl in the book, and whose plain, womanly wit and common sense, plain and undisguised as her open face, is an excellent foil to the pretty animalism of Rosamond Vincy and the vague religiousness of Dorothea. What could be better than this by way of preparation for old Featherstone’s decease?—

“‘Oh! my dear, you must do things handsomely where there’s last illness and a property. God knows, I don’t grudge them [the relatives on the watch] every ham in the house—only save the best for the funeral. Have some stuffed veal always, and a fine cheese in cut. You must expect to keep open house in these last illnesses,’ said liberal Mrs. Vincy.” Or than this picture of one of George Eliot’s favorite characters?—

“Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might, of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of ‘business.’”

After all, notwithstanding its wit and power, and fund of worldly wisdom, one turns almost with a sense of relief from this disheartening Middlemarch world to the world as seen in Fleurange. Considered merely as a story, for unity of plot and rapidity of action, Fleurange is, to our thinking, far more interesting than Middlemarch. A young girl who has been educated in an Italian convent finds herself soon after leaving it thrown almost entirely upon the world by the death of her father, an artist, to fight the battle of life single-handed. “Young, beautiful, poor, and alone in Paris, what will become of her?” With this question the book opens, and, indeed, the whole story is plainly evolved from this idea. Instead of wasting her efforts on an impossible S. Teresa, Mme. Craven takes up the practical case of a young and religious girl, whose training and education, whatever they may have amounted to in the point of accomplishments, were built upon religion, not a vague unreality, but a religion which in the plainest words taught her to kneel down and pray, not to “the perfect Right,” as did Dorothea, but to God, to Jesus Christ—a being, it may here be mentioned, who is carefully excluded from Middlemarch. The reader need not infer that this inner life of the heroine is insisted upon severely, and that he always finds Fleurange upon her knees. Nothing of the sort. You only feel unconsciously, by little touches here and there, by the tone of the whole story, that the girl lives up to the practical accomplishment of what she was taught in the convent by Madre Maddalena; that she carries her religion out with her into the world as her only guide amidst its manifold dangers; that she has not flung it aside with her leading-strings; and that it is this and this alone which sustains her in the midst of terrible suffering, and saves her from sinking under the pressure of trial.

Fleurange goes first to her uncle’s family in Germany. Their loss of fortune drives her out again from them into the service of a Russian princess, where she is surrounded and flattered by all that the world considers witty, brave, brilliant, and captivating. Her singular beauty and innate nobility enable her to grace the lofty station to which the Princess Catherine assigns her. Here, in Florence, in the very household of his mother, she encounters for the second time Count George de Walden, a handsome and highly accomplished young gentleman, the adoration of his mother and possibly of himself, who is just loitering around Europe, “seeing life.” He met Fleurange before in her father’s studio as she sat for a picture of “Cordelia.” Of course, he fell in love with her, as such young gentlemen will do whose time is heavy on their hands. Father and daughter disappeared. He retained the picture, but what he wanted was the original; and here, after feeding on the memory of his unknown love for a year or so, he finds her actually domesticated in his mother’s household. This is what a playwright would consider “an excellent situation,” particularly as the princess suspects nothing of what is passing under her eyes. As a matter of course, they fall in love, and, equally as a matter of course, they contrive to make their love known. And this is the trying time for Fleurange.

It is not that she is dazzled with the prince, but with what she considers the perfect man. And indeed, in the eyes of the world, Count George is a perfect man, whilst, in the eyes of his mother, he is something still more; and therefore a mésalliance would to her, whose heart was entirely her son’s—all the rest of her being divided between the modiste, the physician, and the salon—seem a greater crime than many of those which bring men to the scaffold. Fleurange knows this, and therefore—though, when the confession is forced from her, she does not even to himself deny her love for George and her desire to be his wife—she is convinced that their union is impossible. She does the best thing under the circumstances: she determines to leave the household of the princess; and thus, not for the first time, do the promptings of duty, of what one ought to do, of what God would have us do, correspond with those of common sense. George has avowed his love for Fleurange to his mother, and the confession has such an effect upon her that she is cured for the time from an attack of one of those incurable maladies not uncommon with ladies who are blessed with everything that this world can offer. There is caste even in illnesses, and fashion in a complaint as in a bonnet. Thus, when some years back the eye-glass became a fashionable ornament, all young England, fashionable and would-be fashionable, suddenly grew weak in one eye, whilst the “sons of industry” remained in their normal condition.

The princess rises to the gravity of the situation, and extracts a promise from her son that he will never marry Fleurange without her consent. But all her difficulties are smoothed away by Fleurange herself, who, even though the count has asked her to be his wife, determines to sacrifice herself for his sake, and go.

“‘Fleurange,’ said the count, with a grave accent of sincerity far more dangerous than that of passion, ‘you shall be my wife if you will consent to be—if you will accept this hand I offer you.’

“‘With your mother’s consent?’ said Fleurange slowly, and in a low tone. ‘Can you assure me of that?’

“After a moment’s hesitation, George replied: ‘No, not to-day; but she will yield her consent, I assure you.’

“Fleurange hesitated in her turn. She knew only too well to what a degree this hope was illusory, but this was her last opportunity of conversing with him. The next day would commence their lifelong separation, which time, distance, and prolonged absence would continually widen. There was no longer any danger in telling the truth—the truth, alas! so devoid of importance now, but which would, perhaps, second the duty she had to accomplish quite as well as contradiction.

“‘Ah! well,’ she at last replied, with simplicity. ‘Yes, why should I deny it? Should life prove more favorable to us; if by some unforeseen circumstance, impossible to conceive, your mother should cheerfully consent to receive me as a daughter, oh! then what an answer I would make you know without my telling you. You are likewise perfectly aware that until that day I will never listen to you.’

“‘But that day will come,’ cried George vehemently, ‘and that speedily.’

“‘Perhaps,’ said Fleurange. ‘Who knows what time has in store for us? And who knows that in time the obstacle may not come from yourself?’

“She endeavored to say these last words in a playful tone. They were hardly uttered before she suddenly stopped; but the shade of the large cypresses that bordered the road prevented George from seeing the tears that inundated her face.”

Thus they part, under the cypresses. George thinks she is only leaving for a short time, to return again. She goes back to the convent, to bury there her broken heart and the hopes her own strong will has blighted. But convents are not built on broken hearts; and Madre Maddalena, who is none the less gifted with common sense and worldly prudence for leading a retired and saintly life, sends her back into the world “to continue the contest,” for the reasons already given, with these words:

“O my poor child! it would be much easier for me to tell you to remain and never leave us again. It would be sweeter for me to preserve you thus from all the sufferings that yet await you. But, believe me, the day will come when you will rejoice you were not spared these sufferings; and you will acknowledge that she who is now speaking to you knew you better than you knew yourself.”

Fleurange goes back to the world, to her uncle’s family, which is gradually recovering its fall through the efforts of Clement, her cousin, who was the first to welcome her among them. Notwithstanding her suffering, she carries on all the duties of life like a Christian woman, without despondency as though God were blotted out of the world, and equally without that foolish ostentation of gaiety sometimes assumed. She never thought with Dorothea that she had suffered “all the troubles of all the people on the face of the earth.” The hour never came to her “in which the waves of suffering shook her too thoroughly to leave any power of thought”; not that she suffered or loved less than Dorothea, but because she saw through all something higher than human suffering and more lovely than human love. That pagan hour never came to her, when Dorothea “repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man”; when “she besought hardness, and coldness, and aching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish”; nor did “she lie on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her, while her grand woman’s frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.” Fleurange never, as did Dorothea, “yearned toward the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her errant wrong.” Whether she yearned or not, she knew what was right and what was wrong, and, by praying to God for help and strength, she did right. If women in love stop to ask themselves what is the “perfect right,” in nine cases out of ten in love matters the perfect right will be the absolute wrong. Right is fixed; there is a law in those things, as in all questions of the soul, not evolved out of the individual’s brains, but out of the heart of Christian charity, which is in Christ. Duty does not depend on feeling “the largeness of the world,” and on being “a part of that involuntary, palpitating life,” but on being a creation of God. George Eliot tends to pantheism, and, spite of herself, Christian instinct only prompts her heroine to do what is right. If we are “a part of that involuntary and palpitating life,” and nothing more, there is no necessary reason for charity.

The difference between Dorothea and Fleurange, two characters which, allowing for side differences of clime, are naturally similar, consists in all the sufferings of the one bearing the aspect of self-torture, whilst those of the other are a sacrifice. The sorrows of Fleurange, which, after all, are much greater than those of Dorothea, are endured for God’s sake and as coming from God. They are not a whit less painful to nature on this account; but they are explicable, and have a meaning which Dorothea never seems to realize. One suffers because she cannot help herself; the other because it is God’s will. On George Eliot’s principle, there is no guarantee for a person doing right at all, inasmuch as it is so very difficult to determine what is right. If right be “a part of that involuntary and palpitating life” only, it has no meaning beyond what is contained in the word accident; that is to say, right and wrong are effects of circumstance. Nor is this forcing a meaning, as may be seen from various passages in the book—unless, indeed, we have read them very wrongly. Thus, she speaks of the spirit struggling “against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for it, and bring the heart to its final pause.” She sneers at our referring a man “to the divine regard with perfect confidence,” and says: “Nay, it is even held sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he may have got from us.” And in another place: “Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic, with our dramatis personæ folded in her hand.”

This sounds very fine, and that last sentence might have been written by one of the Greek poets. It is beautifully pagan; but, after all, human life is regulated in man and woman by a will that is free to use or reject the “slow preparation of effects,” to laugh at the phantom, destiny; and when it pleases God to bring this lesser life of time to “a final pause,” man goes before his Creator to give an account of his servitude indeed, but not of his slavery.

Fleurange writes from the convent to the princess. She herself had arranged the plot which was to blind George to her final departure, and this is how the princess receives the letter of the girl who had so freely offered up her heart on the altar of duty. The princess knew of the sacrifice. It is doubtful whether Rosamond Vincy ever displayed her unconscious selfishness so thoroughly as this:

“The Princess Catherine, in an elegant morning négligé, was alone with the Marquis Adelardi in her small salon, when a letter was brought her on a silver salver. She glanced at the address.

“‘Ah! from Gabrielle’ [Fleurange], she exclaimed. ‘The very letter I was expecting to-day.’

“She opened it and hastily ran over its contents. ‘Very well done—very,’ she said. ‘Nothing could be more natural. She hit upon the very best thing to say.... Here, Adelardi,’ continued she, throwing him the letter, ‘read it. It must be owned that this Gabrielle is reliable and true to her word. Moreover, she has a good deal of wit.’

“Adelardi attentively read the letter.

“‘What you have just remarked, princess, is very true; but this time circumstances have favored you. This letter was not written for the occasion; it is sincere from beginning to end. This young girl can keep a secret, but is incapable of prevarication. This is not the kind of a letter she would have written if the contents were not absolutely true.”

“‘Do you think so?’ said the princess. “It is of no consequence, however, as to that, though it would simplify everything still more. But in that case—ah! ciel! let me look at the letter again.’

“She now read it entirely through, instead of merely glancing at the contents.

“‘But in that case, I have lost my physician, and the only one who ever understood my case. This, par exemple! is a real misfortune. If he had had time, at least, to answer my last letter, and tell me what springs I should go to this year! Whom shall I consult now? May is nearly gone, and next month I ought to be there. Really, I am unlucky!’

“‘What do you expect, princess?’ said the marquis, in a tone imperceptibly ironical. ‘One cannot always have good luck.’”

In the quiet of her German retreat, Fleurange suddenly receives the news that an insurrection has broken out in Russia, in which George is implicated. He is taken prisoner, and only awaits in St. Petersburg the sentence which is to banish him to that living tomb, Siberia. Fleurange now sees the opportunity of uniting herself to her lover by burying herself with him. As his hopes in this world are for ever blasted, she obtains the consent of the princess to their union, and sets out for St. Petersburg under the guidance of her young cousin Clement, who knows the object of her mission. This journey and its results complete the fourth book, entitled “The Immolation,” and in it the author rises to a height of power in pathos, description, and incident which is all the more telling that it was altogether unsuspected: The long ride along the dreary strand through the day and through the night; the crossing of the frozen river in the darkness, with the ice cracking ominously beneath them; the scene where Clement and Fleurange are left alone in the face of eternity and immediate death, and where, for the first and last time, when hope of life seems banished, the confession of his love bursts out of his young heart to the half-conscious girl; the last struggle to carry her safe through on her mission of self-immolation to the man she loves—all told in the same simple, unpretentious style, but with an inner force that carries the reader along, and absorbs him as though he were witnessing a tragedy. The strain is sustained to the close of the story. Amid all the fascination, and glitter, and glare of the imperial court of the Czar, when the late Emperor Nicholas was in his “golden prime,” creeps the oppressive sense of a mute but awful terrorism through an atmosphere of combustible human passion all the more dangerous for being so constrained. The petition of Fleurange is about to be granted; but, as it passes through the hands of Vera, a favorite maid of the empress, it is represented as coming from her, between whom and George a sort of betrothal had taken place, and who is in love with him. His sentence, through the instrumentality of Fleurange, is commuted to pardon on condition that he should pass four years on his estates in Livonia, and that he marry Vera before setting out. George is ignorant of the arrival of Fleurange, of her petition, of her desire to bury herself alive with him in Siberia. Vera sees Fleurange, and implores her to save him by the still greater sacrifice of renouncing him for ever. Fleurange goes back again without a word. The man for whom she made so many sacrifices was utterly unworthy of her, and congratulates himself that he escaped committing the foolishness of marrying her, though really in love with her for a time. The selfishness of the mother comes out in the son. As Fleurange and her cousin turn homewards, they meet the bridal party leaving the church. Once more she seeks to bury herself in the convent, and once more Madre Maddalena warns her back. She tells her that, at her first visit, her sufferings appeared as the expiation of an idolatry the extent of which she did not realize; but that something more was essential—the shattering of the idol, though its destruction seemed to involve the very breaking of her own heart.

The shattering of Dorothea’s idol brings a blank despair; and although she marries Ladislaw, and is presumably happy with him, nevertheless she felt “that there was always something better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better.” The final shattering of Fleurange’s idol brings peace and opens her eyes to the silent heroism that had stood at her side all through, and for every pang of hers suffered a thousand. There is a vast amount of latent power in this story that stands out the more it is considered. Clement is kept in the background through much of the action. We only know that he loves Fleurange, and, prominently as her self-sacrifice is advanced, the shadow of his always overreaches it with the quiet that becomes a true man. At last her eyes are opened, and she sees, no longer Clement, “her brother,” but Clement, the man who has loved her all the while. The closeness of their relationship—that of first cousins—was almost necessary to bring out this part of the story, their almost continual intercourse after their first seeing each other, without the idea ever occurring to Fleurange that her cousin, who was a stranger to her up to the age of eighteen, might possibly fall in love with her. It is no encouragement to marriage within the prohibited degrees to hit upon such an incident once in a story; as little as it is necessary to inform the Catholic reader of what he or she will know beforehand: that the dispensation of the church is necessary to the contracting such a marriage.

The book, which has only been touched upon in its leading character, will afford an excellent foil to Middlemarch in many ways. The latter, as perhaps the very title indicates, devotes itself chiefly to the English middle class. Fleurange gives pleasant glimpses of German and Italian life with what, from intrinsic evidence, might be judged to be a very true picture of the Russian court and social atmosphere. Though there are plenty of titled folk, it is a consolation for once to find a princess talking like a rational being; not always addressing her attendant as “minion,” her butler as “slave,” and terrifying the ears and eyes of the groundlings by the splendor of her cheap tragedy rhetoric, the glory of her equipages, or the coruscations of her diamonds. Her son, the count, does not, as do most of his class in the titled novel, divide his time between the stable and the green-room. The marquis is not “a villain of the deepest dye,” whether natural or artificial. Though an Italian, he does not carry a poison philter about with him; he employs no bravos, he never carries off Chastity in the shape of a milliner, to be finally chastised by Virtue in a smock-frock. In fact, all these titled folk are very unlike the article one is accustomed to find within flaming covers. The heartlessness and artificiality almost necessarily evoked in the high social atmosphere which Fleurange breathes for a time, is none the less strikingly brought out because it is not taken in epigrammatic parcels, as it were, and flung in your face, after the manner of the author of Middlemarch. The lesson of Felix Dornthall’s wicked life is none the less impressive because, when dying in the hospital ward, Charity stands by his bedside and prays for him as the ill-spent life flickers out in the darkness. It is no shock to human feelings to see Fleurange in her bitter hours kneel down and pray for help to a God she believes can help her. If life is not all “beer and skittles,” neither is it all a continual mistake and a bitter trial. If we cannot have “ideal perfection,” it may be a consolation to some to feel assured that we can do very well without it, and that there is something in the striving after real perfection worthy of human endeavor. To George Eliot, the world was born yesterday, and only grew with her growing faculties. Christianity has practically gone by, and this is not the age for its heroes and heroines. The sham and the cant of it only remain. As long as the sham and the cant produce such characters as Madre Maddalena, Fleurange, Dr. Leblanc, and Clement, we shall welcome the sham and the cant in preference to the reality which can only give us Dorothea and Lydgate as types of true nobility and all that the perfection of manhood and womanhood may expect to come to nowadays. Whilst admiring the wit, and the worldly wisdom, and that power which only ripened genius can give of saying the best thing in the best way which Middlemarch displays throughout, we confess to a little heartsickness at seeing all the nature of a woman author going out over Rosamond Vincy.

Fleurange is certainly a relief after the unnatural atmosphere of Middlemarch, where all is false, uncertain, cold, hard, and brilliant. Though the story is very human, and in this respect has not a whit less of earth than the other, it suffers nothing by an occasional glimpse of heaven. Poor humanity likes a little hope, particularly when it has a very sound title to hope. These two authors traverse it as a hospital; the one surgeon-like, knife in hand, cutting and lopping the useless and unsightly limbs with bright, keen weapon and merciless precision, leaving the dead to bury their dead; the other, like a sister of charity, to bandage the wound, and comfort the sick, and pray by the dying. How different is the same scene to the eyes of each, and how different is each in the eyes of the sick patients! While they admire the skill of the one, they shudder and turn instinctively from her; on the other streaming eyes are bent, and troubled hearts murmur, “God bless you!”

---

[GRAPES AND THORNS.]

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE.”