THE HOME-RULE CANDIDATE.
A STORY OF “NEW IRELAND.”
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN,” “THE ROMANCE OF A PORTMANTEAU,” ETC., ETC.
CHAPTER II.
NEW IRELAND AND YOUNG ENGLAND.
How glad I felt when morning came, as it brought me nearer to seeing our fair guest! I gathered a bouquet for her, wet with the kisses of the lingering night-dew. I flatter myself that my bouquets are constructed with a tender regard for tone. I have sat for hours in Paris, upon an upturned empty basket in the Marché aux Fleurs, watching the fleuristes deftly composing those exquisite poems in color which serve to render flowers a charming necessity. Upon this occasion I selected blood-red geraniums as the outer edge, with narrowing circlets of stefanotis and mignonette, the whole enshrined in a bower of maiden-hair fern. How lovely she looked when I presented them to her at breakfast; how enchanting her transparent complexion, that flushed as she spoke, and crimsoned when she was spoken to! Alphonse Karr speaks of a similar indefinable charm in his own delightful way: “Elle avait ce charme poétiquement virginal, qui est la plus grande beauté de la femme.” Alas! my bouquet had been forestalled by the gift of a veritable last rose of summer which Harry Welstone had culled while I was engaged in imparting some finishing touches to my rather bristly hair. The words “too late” to meet me on the very threshold of my new career! It was truly disheartening.
She was attired in a tightly-fitting dress of pure white, adorned by a series of coquettish blue ribbons, the edgings being of the same color. Her cavalier collar and gauntlet cuffs finished a toilette which almost recalled my Virgil, as I could hardly refrain from exclaiming “O Dea certe!”
“Might I ask, if it is not an unparliamentary question, Mr. Ormonde, at what hour you allowed poor papa to retire to his bed? Was it late last night or early this morning?” she asked with a droll archness.
“Well, it was rather late, Miss Hawthorne; but as your father was good enough to favor me with some exceedingly interesting passages in his senatorial career, the time galloped by at a break-neck pace and we took no note of it.”
I had already learned to play the hypocrite. O Master Cupid! and this was thy first lesson.
“Is my memory mocking me, or did I hear awful mention of Irish whisky?” she laughed.
This enabled me to explain the blunder of my retainer in his desire to uphold the honor of the family, and to exonerate myself from the soupçon of having neglected her society for that of the bottle. Peter’s ideas upon the family status seemed to afford her the liveliest merriment, and she laughed the silvery laugh with which, old playgoers tell me, Mme. Vestris used to bring down the house.
“Peter is a character, then?”
“You will find that out before very long, Miss Hawthorne.”
“I do so love characters!”
I ran over my characteristics like a flash, and found them of the baldest and mildest nature. Not a single strong point came to the rescue, not a liking or a disliking. Pah! what a dull, drowsy weed; what a prosy, colorless nobody.
“Peter is a great admirer of the fair sex,” said my mother. “You must see him on Sunday standing at the chapel gate ‘discoorsin’’ the pretty girls as they pass in to last Mass.”
“Is he a bachelor?”
“Oh! yes. I have often asked him why he doesn’t marry, and his invariable reply is, ‘I’d rayther keep looking at them.’”
“Perhaps I might have a chance,” said Miss Hawthorne, with a delicious coquetry in her manner.
“Not a bit of it, my dear; he would not ally himself to a Saxon for a crock of gold.”
“He is a hard-hearted wretch, then,” laughed our guest, “and I shall not endeavor to make a conquest.”
Little did she imagine that she might have uttered Veni, vidi, vici at that particular moment. A poor triumph, though—a paltry victory. I did not feel myself worthy of powder and shot.
Harry Welstone kept gazing at Miss Hawthorne from out his supremely handsome eyes. How I envied him those deep, dark, corsair-like organs of vision, inwardly railing against my own heavy blues! He chatted with her upon every conceivable topic, planning excursions, arranging her boating, riding, walking, and even the songs she was to sing, disposing of her time to his own especial advantage, and leaving me helplessly out in the cold with the prosy member for Doodleshire. I could not find a solitary topic to speak upon; at least, just as I had summoned up courage to “cut in,” as they say at whist, the wind had shifted and the current of the conversation had taken another turn, leaving my disabled argosy high and dry. I had spent my most recent years in the secluded valley of Kilkenley with my mother, my horses, and my dogs. I had seen little or nothing of the whirl of the world, and was so purely, so essentially local as to be almost ignorant of what was going on in the outer circle of life. Of course I read the Freeman’s Journal—generally two days old when it reached us—and then I merely glanced at the hunting fixtures or the sales of thoroughbreds at Farrell’s or Sewell’s. Of course I had done some reading; and of a lighter kind the Waverley Novels and Dickens, the Titanic Thackeray and a few unwholesome French effusions; but of late I had read nothing, and, as a consequence, was local to a contemptuous degree. In what did Peter, my own servant, differ from me? Merely in the perusal of a few books. He was a better judge of a horse and—but why proceed? My reflections were all of this melancholy cast as I listened to dissertations upon Chopin, Schubert, and Wagner, upon the novelists and poets of the period, upon Gainsborough hats and Pompadour flounces, upon the relative merits of Rève d’Amour and Ess’ bouquet. Harry and our fair young guest kept the shuttlecock going between them, and I was forced to bear the burden of my own ignorance in a stolid, stupid silence. One chance was offered me which I took as I would a six-foot wall—flying. The question of horses came upon the tapis, and I vaulted into the saddle. I rode down Harry and scarcely spared Miss Hawthorne; nor did I draw rein until I had described the run of last season, from meet to death, winding a “View-halloo!” that actually caused the teacups to ring upon their saucers. This blew off my compressed excitement, and, although very much ashamed, I felt all the better for it. My foot was on my native heath, and I showed her that my name was McGregor.
“What are you going to do with Mr. Hawthorne to-day?” asked my mother.
“What are you going to do with Miss Hawthorne, mother?” I retorted.
“Oh! Harry Welstone and I have arranged all that. You are not in the baby-house.”
This was gratifying intelligence with a vengeance. I was told off as bear-leader to the prosy Parliament man, while Harry was to revel in the radiance of Miss Hawthorne’s presence. This was grilling. And yet what could I do or say? My hands were tied behind my back. I was host, and should pay deference to the respected rites of bread and salt, the sacred laws of hospitality. A sacrifice was demanded, and in me was found the victim.
“Could we not manage to unite our forces?” I suggested, in the faint, flickering hope that a compromise might be effected.
“Impossible!” said Harry.
I could have flung my teacup at his head.
“And why not, pray?” I asked in a short, testy way.
“Because you are to take Mr. Hawthorne over to Clonacooney, and to talk tenant-right and landlord-wrong with old Mr. Cassidy; then, when exhausted there, you are bound for the model farm at Rouserstown, and any amount of steam-ploughing and top-dressing; then you can pay a flying visit to Phil Dempsey’s hundred-acre field, and show the Saxon the richness of the land he has invaded; then you are to call for Father O’Dowd, where you can coal and do Home Rule; and then you may come home to dinner, where we shall be very happy to receive you.” And Harry laughed loudly and long at my utter discomfiture—a discomfiture written in my rueful countenance in lines as heavy as those laid on the grim visage of Don Quixote by Gustave Doré.
“You are very kind, Welstone—a most considerate fellow. Why not have arranged for Knobber, or the other side of the Shannon—say Ballybawn, or Curlagh Island?”
The iron had entered my soul.
“Is not this arrangement a very heavy tax upon Mr. Ormonde’s good-nature?” exclaimed our fair guest, graciously coming to the rescue, addressing my mother, who, par parenthèse, expressed herself perfectly charmed with Miss Hawthorne.
“Tax! my dear child? On the contrary, it is just the sort of day my son will thoroughly enjoy: going about the country, talking second crops, turnips, and the price of hay and oats. He is devoted to all that sort of thing, and I doubt if even his duties of gallantry to you, Mabel, would get the better of his devotion to Mme. Ceres.”
I was about to blurt out something that might possibly have compromised me on all sides, when, as luck would have it, the M.P. entered.
He stalked into the room as if the division-bell were ringing, and took his seat as though below the gangway, bowing gravely to the assembled House. He lifted his cup as he would a blue-book, and handled his knife as an act of Parliament.
“You will—ahem!—I’m sure excuse my being a little late”—with a preparatory cough—“but the late sittings of last session have totally unfitted me for bed until the wee sma’ hours.”
“Surely, papa, you are not going to carry the House of Commons hours into the romantic glens of Kilkenly?”
“I admit that I ought not to do so, my dear, but, as a great statesman once observed—I, ahem! quite forget his name at this particular moment—habit is second nature; and were I to retire early, it would—ha! ha!—be only for the purpose of quarrelling with one of my best friends, my best friend—Morpheus.”
“You must find the fatigues of Parliament very great,” said my mother.
“Herculean, madam. My correspondence, before I go down to the House at all, is a herculean task, and one in which I am very considerably aided by my daughter.”
“Oh! yes,” she laughed; “I can write such diplomatic letters as ‘I beg to acknowledge receipt of your communication of the blank instant, which shall have my very best attention.’ Papa’s constituents invariably hear from me in that exact phraseology by return of post. I have a whole lot of such letters, as the Americans say, ‘on hand.’”
“If it were not for the off-nights, madam,” continued the member for Doodleshire, “Wednesdays and Saturdays, I should seriously think of accepting the Chiltern Hundreds, which is a gentlemanlike way of resigning a seat in the House.”
“And on the off-nights poor papa devotes himself to me,” exclaimed Mabel; “and I always accept invitations for those nights, so the only chance he has for sleep is during the recess.”
I wondered who her friends might be, what they were like, where they resided, and if the men were all in love with her. She had upon three distinct occasions referred to a Mr. Melton, and somehow the mention of this man filled me with a grim foreboding.
“We take too much sleep. We should do with as little as possible, and divide that by three. Sleep is waste of time. Sleep is a sad nuisance, a bore. It is born in a yawn and dies in imbecility,” cried Harry, suddenly bursting into vitality.
“Is it thus you would designate Nature’s soft nurse, sir?” demanded Mr. Hawthorne in a severe tone.
“This comes very badly from Mr. Welstone,” said my mother, “who requires to be called about ten times before he will deign to leave off sleeping.”
“You should see the panels of his door—actually worn away with knuckle-knocking,” I added.
“In the country I sleep because there’s nothing else to do. I get up early! What for? To see the same mist on the same mountains, and the same cows in the same field, and the same birds in the same trees; though, mot d’honneur, I was up and out this morning at eight o’clock, and played Romeo to Miss Hawthorne’s Juliet—at least, so far as a garden and a balcony could do it.”
“Who ever heard of a Romeo by daylight?” I exclaimed sarcastically.
“Let’s see what that love-stricken wretch does ‘neath the sun’s rays. We all know what he says and does in the pale moonlight.”
“He kills Tybalt,” I interposed, not utterly displeased in being able to show Mabel that I was on intimate terms with the Bard of Avon.
“And buys a penn’orth of strychnine,” added Harry with a grin.
“We know a gentleman who plays Romeo to perfection,” observed Mabel. “Such a handsome fellow! And the dress suits him charmingly.”
How I hated this Romeo!
“A Mr. Wynwood Melton.”
I knew it before she had uttered the words.
“An actor?” I drawled in a careless sort of way.
“Oh! dear, no; he’s in the Foreign Office, and a swell. He is nephew or cousin—I don’t know which—to Mr. Gladstone or some other great chief.” This with an animation that sent a thrill of despairing jealousy to my very soul.
“He is—ahem!—a very promising young man, a great favorite of ours, and will make his mark. He is destined for the House. You’ll meet him, Mr. Ormonde, when you come over. He is—ha! ha! ha!—rather a constant visitor,” with a significant glance in the direction of his daughter.
She flushed crimson. The deep scarlet glowed all over her like a rosy veil. That blush tolled the death-knell of my hopes. Our eyes met; she withdrew her glance, as I haughtily outstared her.
“He is a great favorite of papa’s,” she murmured, almost apologetically.
“And how about papa’s only daughter?” laughed my mother.
“Papa’s only daughter admires him very much—thinks him very handsome, very nice, very cultivated, very clever, et voilà tout.”
“What more would papa’s only daughter have?”
A quaint little shrug, and a dainty laugh.
“A thousand things,” she said. From that moment I marked down Melton as my foe—as the man who had dared to cross my path. Not that I hoped for success, or could ever hope for it; yet to him she had evidently surrendered her heart, and he must reckon with me. Meet him! Rather! I would now accept the invitation to London for the sole purpose of falling foul of Melton. It would be such exquisite torture to see them together; such racking bliss to behold them pressing hands and looking into each other’s eyes. What pleasurable agony to look calmly on while those nameless frivolities and gentle dalliances by which lovers bridge the conventionalities were being performed beneath my very nose! Ha! ha! I would close with Mr. Hawthorne’s offer and make arrangements for proceeding to ‘town,’ as he would persist in calling the English metropolis, at the earliest possible opportunity consistent with his, and Melton’s, convenience.
“Miss Hawthorne,” suddenly exclaimed Harry, “do tell us something more about this Romeo. You have only given us enough to make us wish for more. What is he like?”
“Will you have his portrait in oil or a twopenny photo?” she laughed.
“Let us strike ‘ile’ by all means.”
“Imprimis—that’s a good word to begin with—he is tall.”
“Good!”
“Graceful.”
“Good again!”
“Dignified-looking.”
“Bravissimo!”
“Parts his hair in the centre.”
“I don’t care for that,” said Harry.
“It becomes him.”
“Possibly. Pray proceed. His eyes?”
“Gray.”
“Nose?”
“Aquiline.”
“Beard?—men parting their hair in the centre wear beards.”
“Henri Quatre.”
“Hands?”
“Small and white.”
I threw a hasty glance at mine; they were of the same hue as the leg of the mahogany breakfast-table at which we were seated. Sun and saddle had done their work effectually.
“Does he smile?”
“Why, of course he does.”
“Now,” said Harry, “upon your description of his smile a good deal may depend.”
“I object to this line of cross-examination,” said my mother.
“I consider the subject has been sufficiently thrashed already,” I added. Truly, I was sick of it.
“I shall throw up my brief, if I do not get an answer to my question.”
“I shall tell you by and by, Mr. Welstone.”
“By and by will not do.”
“Well, then, Mr. Melton’s smile is like a sunbeam. Are you satisfied now?”
“Mr. Hawthorne,” said Harry, turning to the M.P., “this is a very bad case.”
“I’m afraid—ha! ha! ha!—that it looks somewhat suspicious,” was the significant reply.
“If you mean—” Mabel began.
“I don’t mean what you mean,” laughed Harry.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” he playfully retorted.
At this juncture Peter O’Brien’s shock head appeared at the open window, through which he unceremoniously thrust it, announcing, in no very delicate accents:
“The yokes is convaynient.”
“That’s a fine morning, Peter,” exclaimed Miss Hawthorne, rising and approaching the window.
“Troth, it’s that same, miss, glory be to God! It’s iligant weather intirely for the craps.”
“We’ve cut all our corn in England, Peter.”
“See that, now,” gloomily; but, brightening up, he added: “Sorra a haporth to hindher us from cuttin’ it long ago, av it was only ripe enough.”
“An Irish peasant will never admit Saxon superiority in anything,” said my mother, placing her arm about Mabel’s waist. “What ‘yokes’ have you out to-day, Peter?”
“The shay for you, ma’am, and the young leddy there; though I’m afeared it’s not as nate as it ought for to be, be raisin av a rogue av a hin—a red wan, full av consait an’ impidence—makin’ her nest right—”
“Here, Peter,” I cried, to put a stop to these hideous revelations, “get my car round at once.” I could have strangled him.
As all English visitors to Ireland are possessed of a frantic desire to experience the jolting of an Irish jaunting-car, I ordered my own special conveyance round, also from the workshop of Bates—a low, rakish-looking craft, with a very deep well for the dogs when going out shooting, and bright yellow corduroy cushions; an idea of my own, and upon which I rather piqued myself. Harry Welstone and the ladies came to the doorsteps to see us off, and while he explained the beauties of the chariot to Miss Hawthorne I endeavored to initiate her father into the mysteries of clinging on, advising him not to clutch the front and back rail so convulsively, but rather to allow his body to swing with every motion of the vehicle, and above all things to trust to luck.
“Lave yourself as if ye wor a sack o’ male, sir,” suggested Peter, who was charioteer, “or as if ye had a sup in. Sorra a man that was full ever dhropped off av a car, barrin’ Murty Flinn; an’ shure that was not his fault aither, for it was intirely be raisin av a bargain he med wud a lump av a mare he was dhrivin’ at that time.”
“Who was Murty Flinn, Peter?” asked Miss Hawthorne.
“A dacent boy, miss, that lives beyant at the crass-roads—a rale hayro for sperits,” was the prompt response, accompanied by a semi-military salute.
“And how did he fall off the car?”
“Troth, thin, mavourneen, it wasn’t Murty that fell aff av the car, so much as that the car fell aff av Murty; an’ this is how it happened: Murty was comin’ from the fair av Bohernacopple, where he wint for to sell a little slip av a calf, an’ afore he left the fair he tuk several gollioges av sperits, an’ had a cupple uv haits wud Phil Clancy, the red-hedded wan—not Phil av Tubbermory—an’ he was bet up intirely betune the whiskey an’ the rounds wud red Clancy, so that whin he cum for to make for home he was hard set for to yoke the mare, an’ harder set agin for to mount to his sate on the car. But Murty is the persevarionist man ye ever laid yer two purty eyes on, miss, an’ he ruz himself into the sate afther a tremendjus battle; and th’ ould mare, whin she seen that he was comfortable, tuk the road like a Christian mare. Well, Murty rowled backwards an’ forwards, an’ every joult av the car ye’d think wud sind him on the crown av his caubeen; but, be me song, he was as secure as a prisner in Botany Bay, an’ it’s a sailor he thought he was, up in a hammock no less. Well, miss, the night was a little dark an’ the road was shaded wud threes, an’ whin they cum to th’ ould graveyard at Killencanick never a fut the mare ‘ud go farther.
“‘What’s the matther wud ye?’ axed Murty; but sorra an answer she med him.
“‘Are ye bet,’ sez he, ‘an’ you so far from home?’ She riz a cupple av kicks, as much as to say, ‘Ye hit it off that time, anyhow, Misther Flinn!’
“‘Did ye get a dhrink at the fair beyant, Moria?’—the little mare’s name, miss. She shuk her hed in a way that tould him that she was as dhry as a cuckoo.
“‘Musha, musha, but that was cruel thratemint,’ sez he. ‘What’s to be done at all, at all?’
“Well, miss, he thought for a minit, an’ he sez: ‘Moria, we’re only two mile from the Cock an’ Blackberry, an’ I’ll tell ye what I’ll do wud ye: you carry me wan mile, sez he, ‘an’ I’ll carry you th’ other.’”
This proposition on the part of Murty Flinn was received with a peal of ringing laughter from Miss Hawthorne, who, with flashing eyes and an eager expression of delighted curiosity, begged of Peter to proceed.
“Av coorse, miss,” replied the gratified Jehu. “Well, ye see the words was hardly acrass his mouth whin, cockin’ her ears an’ her tail, th’ ould mare darted aff as if she was runnin’ for the Cunningham Coop at Punchestown, an’ Murty swingin’ like a log round a dog’s neck all the voyage; an’ the minnit she come to the milestone undher Headford demesne she stopped like a dead rabbit.
“‘Where are we now?’ axed Murty.
“She sed nothin’, but rouled the car up to the milestone an’ grazed it wud the step.
“‘Well, yer the cutest little crayture,’ sez Murty, ‘that ever wore shoes,’ sez he; ‘an’, be the powers, as ye kept yer word wud me, I’ll keep me word wud you.’ And he rouled aff av the car into the middle o’ the road, while th’ ould mare unyoked herself as aisy as if it was aitin’ hay she was insted av undoin’ buckles that riz many a blisther on Murty’s fingers; for the harness was contrairy, and more betoken as rusty as a Hessian’s baggonet. When Murty seen the mare stannin’ naked in the road, he med an offer for to get up, but he was bet intirely be raisin av the sup he tuk, an’ he cudn’t stir more nor his arms; but the ould mare wasn’t goin’ for to be done out av her jaunt in that way, so she cum over, an’ sazin’ him—savin’ yer presence, miss—be the sate av his small-clothes, riz him to his feet, an’, wud a cupple av twists, dhruv him betune the shafts av the car, an’ in a brace av shakes had him harnessed like a racer.
“‘I’m reddy now, ma’am,’ sez Murty, mighty polite, for he seen the whip in one av her forepaws—‘I’m reddy now, ma’am; so up wud ye, an’ I’ll go bail we’ll not be long coverin’ the road betune this an’ the Cock an’ Blackberry.’
“Well, miss, th’ ould mare mounted the car, an’ Murty started aff as well as he cud; but he was bet up afther runnin’ a few yards, an’ he dhropped into a walk, but no sooner he done it than he got a welt av the whip that med him hop.
“‘What are ye doin?’ sez he, an’ down cums the lash agin be way av an answer.
“‘How dare ye raise yer hand to a Christian?’ sez he. A cupple av welts follied this.
“‘I’ll not stan’ it!’ he bawled; but the more he roared an’ bawled the heavier th’ ould mare welted, an’ he might as well be spakin’ to the Rock o’ Cashel.
“‘Hould yer hand!’ he roared, thryin to soothe her—‘hould yer hand, an’ ye’ll have a bellyful av the finest oats in the barony—ould Tim Collins’ best crap. Dhrop the whip, an’ sorra a taste av work ye’ll do till next Michaelmas. I can’t thravel faster, Moria, be raisin av a corn,’ and the like; but the mare had him, an’ she ped off ould scores, an’ be the time they kem to the Cock an’ Blackberry poor Murty was bet like an ould carpet, an’ he wasn’t fit for to frighten the crows out av an oat-field. An’ that’s how it all happened, miss.”
“And did he give Moria the drink?” asked Miss Hawthorne.
“He sez he did,” replied Peter, with a peculiar grin; “but the people that owns the public-house sez that he niver darkened their doore, an’ that he was found lying undher the yoke near the crass-roads, wud th’ ould mare grazin’ about a half a mile down the road. But it’s a thrue story,” he added with somewhat of solemn emphasis.
“Si non e vero e ben trovato,” laughed our guest, as she waved us a graceful adieu.
It was one of those lovely mornings nowhere to be found but in Ireland: the dim, half-gray light, the heavily-perfumed air, the stillness that imparted a sort of sad solemnity to the scene, the glorious tints of green on hill and hollow that mellowed themselves with the sombre sky, a something that inspires a silence that is at once a resource and a regret. I became wrapped up in my own thoughts—so much so that, although I held the “ribbons” I was scarcely aware of the fact, and it was only the exclamation from Peter: “Blur an’ ages! Masther Fred, luk out for the brudge”—a narrow structure, across which it was possible to pass without grazing the parapet walls, and nothing more—that brought me to my senses. My guest, in spite of the earnest instructions of Peter, was clinging frantically to the rails at either end of the seat, and, instead of allowing his body to swing with the motion of the vehicle, was endeavoring to sit bolt upright, as though he were in the House of Commons and in anxious expectation of catching the Speaker’s eye. Upon arriving at the foot of Ballymacrow hill Peter sprang to the ground—an example followed by myself; but Mr. Hawthorne retained his seat, as there was plenty of walking in store for him, and my horse could well endure the weight of one, when the weight of three would make a very essential difference in so steep a climb.
Peter, reins in hand, walked beside the “mimber,” and in a few minutes was engaged in “discoorsin’” him.
“Home Rule? Sorra a wan o’ me cares a thraneen for it, thin.”
“What is a thraneen?” asked Mr. Hawthorne, eager for information all along the line.
“A thraneen is what the boys reddies their dhudeens wud,” was the response to the query.
“I am still in ignorance.”
“Wisha, wisha! an’ this is a mimber av Parliamint,” muttered Peter, “an’ he doesn’t know what a thraneen manes, an’ the littlest gossoon out av Father Finnerty’s school beyant cud tell him”; adding aloud: “A thraneen is a blade av grass that sheeps nor cows won’t ait, an’ it sticks up in a field; there’s wan,” suiting the action to the word, plucking it from a bank on the side of the road, and presenting it to the member for Doodleshire.
“And so you are not a Home-Ruler, my man?”
“Sorra a bit, sir.”
“Then what are you?”
“I am a repayler. I’m for teetotal separation; that’s what Dan O’Connell sed to Drizzlyeye.”
“What did Mr. O’Connell say to Mr. Disraeli?” asked my guest in very Parliamentary phraseology.
“I’ll tell ye. ‘What is it yez want at all, at all, over beyant in Hibernium?’ sez Drizzlyeye. ‘Yez are always wantin’ somethin,’ sez he, ‘an’ what the dickens do yez want now?’
“‘I’ll tell ye what we want,’ says Dan, as bould as a ram.
“‘What is it, Dan?’ sez Drizzlyeye.
“‘We want teetotal separation,’ sez Dan.
“‘Arrah, ge lang ou’ a that,’ sez Drizzlyeye. ‘Yez cudn’t get along wudout us,’ sez he.
“‘Cudn’t we?’ sez Dan. ‘Thry us, Drizzlyeye,’ sez he. ‘How did we get on afore?’
“‘Bad enuff,’ sez Drizzlyeye—‘bad enuff, Dan. Yez were always batin’ aich other and divartin’ yerselves, and, barrin’ the weltin’ Brian Boru gev the Danes at Clontarf, bad cess to the haporth yez ever done, Dan. England is yer best frind. We always play fair,’ sez he.
“‘How dar ye say that to me?’ sez Dan, takin’ the Traity av Limerick out av his pocketbuke. ‘Luk at that documint,’ sez he, firin’ up; ‘there’s some av yer dirty work; an’ I ax ye square an’ fair,’ sez Dan, in a hait, for he was riz, ‘if the brakin’ av that wasn’t as bad as anything yer notorious ancesthor ever done?’ alludin’ to Drizzlyeye’s ancesthor, the impenitint thief.
“‘That’s none of my doin’, Dan,’ sez Drizzlyeye, turnin’ white as a banshee.
“‘I know it’s not,’ sez Dan; ‘but ye’d do it to-morrow mornin’,’ sez he, ‘an’ that’s why I demand the repale an’ a teetotal separation.’
“‘Begorra, but I think yer right, Dan,’ sez Drizzlyeye.”
“Such an interview could not possibly have occurred,” observed the practical Englishman.
“Cudn’t it?” with an indignant toss of the head. “I had it from Lanty Finnegan, who heerd it from the bishop’s own body-man.” And Peter, giving the horse a lash of the whip, dashed into the laurestine-bordered avenue leading up to the cosey cottage wherein resided the “darlintest priest outside av Room,” Father Myles O’Dowd.
Father O’Dowd’s residence was a long, single-storied house, whitewashed to a dazzling whiteness, and thatched with straw the color of the amber wept by the sorrowing seabird. A border of blood-red geraniums ran along the entire façade, and the gable ends were embowered in honeysuckle and clematis. A rustic porch entwined with Virginia creeper jealously guarded the entrance, boldly backed up by the “iligantest ratter in the barony” in the shape of a bandy-legged terrier, who winked a sort of facetious welcome at Peter and bestowed a cough-like bark of recognition upon me. The parlor was a genuine snuggery, “papered with books,” all of which, from St. Thomas of Aquinas to Father Perrone, were of the rarest and choicest theological reading. Nor were the secular authors left out in the cold, to which the well-thumbed volumes of the Waverley Novels and the immortal facetiæ of Dickens bore ample testimony. A charming copy of Raphael’s masterpiece stood opposite the door, the glorious eyes of the Virgin Mother lighting the apartment with a soft and holy radiance, while the fresh and rosy flesh-tints of the divine Infant bespoke the workmanship as being that of a maestro. A portrait of Henry Grattan hung over the chimney-piece, and facing it, between the windows, a print of the review of the volunteers in College Green, while some dozen valuable engravings, all of a sacred character, adorned the walls in graceful profusion. A statuette of the Holy Father occupied a niche specially prepared for it, and an old brass-bound rosewood bureau, black as ebony from age, sternly asserted itself in defiance of a hustling crowd of horse-hair-seated chairs; a shining sofa a little the worse for the wear, and presenting a series of comfortless ridges to the unwary sitter, and a genuine Domingo mahogany table bearing an honest corned beef and cabbage and “boiled leg with” completed a picture that was at once refreshing and invigorating to behold.
“Shure he’s only acrass the bog, Masther Fred,” exclaimed Biddy Finnegan, the housekeeper, with a joyous smile illuminating the very frills of her old-world white cap, “an’ I’ll send wan av the boys for him. He’d be sore an’ sorry for to miss ye, sir. An’ how’s the misthress—God be good to her!—an’ the major, whin ye heerd av him? It’s himself that’s kindly and dhroll.” And Biddy, dusting the sofa, requested the member for Doodleshire to take a “sate.”
“Won’t ye have a sup o’ somethin’ afther yer jaunt, Masther Fred, or this gintleman? Och! but here’s himself now.”
Father O’Dowd had been attached to Imogeela since his ordination—a period of thirty years, during twenty-five of which he was its devoted parish priest. Respectfully declining the promotion in the church which his piety, erudition, and talents claimed for him as their natural heritage, he clung with paternal fondness to his little parish, ministering to the spiritual wants of his flock with an earnest and holy watchfulness that was repaid to the uttermost by a childlike and truthful obedience. To his parishioners he was all, everything—guide, philosopher, friend. He shared their joys and their sorrows, their hopes and their fears. He whispered hope when the sky was overcast, urging moderation when the sun was at its brightest. He had christened every child and married every adult in the parish; and those, alas! so many, lying beneath the green grass in the churchyard of Imogeela had been soothed to their long, long rest by the words of heavenly consolation from his pious lips. Ever at his post, the cold, bleak nights of winter would find him wending his way through rugged mountain-passes, fording swollen streams, or wading treacherous bogs to attend to the wants of the sick and dying, while a granite boulder or the stump of a felled tree, the blue canopy of heaven overhead, has upon many memorable occasions constituted his confessional. A profound scholar, a finished gentleman, and, despite his surroundings, a good deal a man of the world, I was proud, exceedingly proud, to be enabled to present to Mr. Hawthorne so true a specimen of that order which Lord John Russell had been pleased to describe as “surpliced ruffians.”
The priest entered, a smile illuminating his expressive face like a ray of sunlight. Stretching forth both hands, he bade me welcome, exclaiming: “Ah! you have made your pilgrimage at last; you come, as old Horace hath it, inter silvas Academi quærere verum. How is your excellent mother? I received your joint epistle, and I hope you got my promissory note, due almost at sight.”
Father O’Dowd was about fifty-five or fifty-six; hale, handsome, and muscular; his silken, snow-white hair and ruddy complexion, with his lustrous, dark blue eyes and glittering teeth, giving him an air of genial cordiality pronounceable at a single glance. Tall, sunburnt, and powerfully built, he carried that solidity of gesture and firmness of tread sometimes so marked in muscular Christianity. I saw with feelings of intense pleasure that my guest was both pleased and impressed—an impression strengthened by the cordial greeting which the worthy priest extended to him.
“Welcome to Ireland, Mr. Hawthorne. It’s about the best thing Strongbow ever did for me—the pleasure of seeing a friend of my dear young friend’s here. Collectively you Saxons hate us; individually you find us not quite the lawless savages the Pall Mall Gazette and Spectator would make us.”
“We want to know you better,” said the M.P.
“Ah! that’s the rub. You don’t know us, and never will know us; but we know you. Englishmen come over to Ireland, believing that a real knowledge of the country is not to be acquired from newspapers, but that a man must see Ireland for himself. They come; they go; and all they pick up is a little of our brogue. We never can hope for much more than what Lucan calls concordia discors.”
“I believe if Ireland were to take the same stand as Scotland—”
“Scotland me no Scotland,” laughed Father O’Dowd.
“Scotland is contented and thrifty.”
“And Ireland is poor and proud. I tell you, Mr. Hawthorne, that we have a big bill of indictment against you that I fear may never be settled in my day. Why should not Scotland be contented? Is she not fed on sugar-plums? Is there not a sandy-haired Scotchman in every position worth having, from the cabinet to the custom-house? Do you not develop all her industries, and pat her on the back like a spoiled child? Are not your royal family ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores, or, if I freely translate myself, more Scotch than the Scotch themselves? Why should she not be contented and prosperous when she gets everything she asks for?”
“But you ask too much, reverend sir.”
“It is scarcely asking too much to ask for one’s own.”
“Surely yours are at best but—ahem!—sentimental grievances, and the House makes every—ahem!—effort at conciliation.”
“We can stand hard knocks and square fighting, and possibly feel all the better for it; but when you speak of conciliation and all that sort of thing we get on our edge at once, as we know that we are going to be bamboozled.”
“But surely you will admit that we have done a good deal for the country. See the Church Disestablishment Act and the Land Act.”
“Only two patches on our ragged coats, my dear sir. We want independence, and that you won’t give us; nor will you offer us a quid pro quo, as you did with Scotland, because you know we would not accept it. No, Mr. Hawthorne, we’ll have to fight you for this, and our Irish members must do the Mrs. Caudle for John Bull, and give him sleepless and wretched nights in the big house at St. Stephen’s.”
“Have you any fault to find with the administration of the laws?”
“Fault! When we find ourselves gagged and fettered by a miserably weak administration, and hedged in by a set of uncertain and floating laws, we begin to think about righting ourselves. You send us a lord-lieutenant who knows as much about Ireland as he does of Bungaroo—who comes over with a hazy idea that there’s some one to be conciliated and some one to be hanged; a chief-secretary who knows less; an attorney-general who, if active, means a necessity for strengthening the garrison; and a commander of the forces who pants for a chance of manœuvring his flying columns over our prostrate bodies. But here comes Biddy Finnegan with a cutlet of mountain mutton, and I can give you a drop of the real mountain dew that never paid the Saxon gauger a farthing duty—or, at least, if we had our rights, ought not, according to Peter O’Brien.” And he laughed. “These subjects are much better worth discussing than English misrule. Quantum est in rebus inane.” And ushering Mr. Hawthorne to a seat upon his right hand, he proceeded to do the honors with a courtly grace blended with a fascinating hospitality.
“That poteen has its story. As I have already told you, it never paid duty. A friend of mine was anxious that I should keep it on tap, as he constantly comes this way. It is somewhat difficult to obtain it now, as the excise officers are, like you members of Parliament, particularly wide awake.” The M.P. bowed solemnly in recognition of the compliment. “At last, however, he managed to drop on a man, who knew another man, who knew another man, in whose cabin this particular crayture was to be found. My friend ferreted him out, and, upon asking the price per gallon, was informed by the manufacturer that he would only charge him eighteen shillings.
“‘Eighteen shillings!’ exclaimed my friend. ‘Why, that’s an enormous price.’
“‘Och! shure,’ replied the other, with a droll look perfectly indescribable, ‘I cudn’t part it for less, as the duty’s riz.’”
It took a considerable time to drive the point of Father O’Dowd’s fictitious narrative and the illicit distiller’s rejoinder into the head of the member for Doodleshire; and when he did manage to grapple it, wishing to lay it by in order to retail it in the House, it was found impossible to get him completely round it, as the word “riz” invariably balked him, and it is scarcely necessary to observe that his Anglican substitution failed in every way to improve the story. The cutlets were deliciously tender, and the potatoes in their jackets so mealy and inviting that the Saxon fell to with a vigor that fairly astonished me. As dish after dish of the diminutive shies disappeared, and potato after potato left its jacket in shreds behind it, I congratulated myself upon the signal success of this visit.
“My drive gave me an appetite, father,” he said. “I haven’t eaten luncheon for many months. In the House I generally pair off with some friend to a biscuit and a glass of sherry; but here I have—ahem!—eaten like a navvy.”
“I’m delighted to hear you mention the drive as the cause of the appetite; for I must endeavor to induce you to repeat it and help me to eat a saddle of mutton that will be fit for Lucullus on Thursday.”
“I am in Mr. Ormonde’s hands.”
I was in an agony—another day from Mabel!
“Oh! Ormonde will do as I direct him; and I’ll tell you what we must conspire about to-night—to induce the ladies to drive over. I should be very pleased to show Miss Hawthorne a little this side of the county.”
I breathed again.
“You shall have my vote,” said the M.P.; “and, if I might dare suggest an amendment to the saddle, it would be in ‘chops.’”
“We might do the swell thing,” laughed the padre, “and have two dishes—an entrée; how magnificently that sounds! In any case I can say with Horace:
“Hinc tibi copia
Manabit ad plenum, benigno
Ruris bonorum opulenta cornu.”
“I have—ahem!—almost forgotten my Horace,” sighed our guest.
“One might say to you, as was said to the non-whist-player, What an unhappy old age you are laying up for yourself, Mr. Hawthorne!”
“Well, reverend sir, so long as a man has the Times he can defy ennui; every leader is an essay.”
“You cannot commit the Times to memory.”
“I read it every day, sir,” was the pompous reply.
“Apropos of the Times, they tell a story of Chief-Baron Pigott which is eminently characteristic. He is one of the most scrupulous, painstaking men the world ever saw, who, sooner than do a criminal injustice, would go over evidence ad nauseam and weigh the pros and cons, driving the bar nearly to distraction. One day a friend found him upon the steps of his house superintending the removal of a huge pile of newspapers.
“‘What papers are those, Chief-Baron?’ he asked.
“‘The London Times.’
“‘Do you read the Times regularly?’
“‘Oh! dear, yes.’
“‘Did you read that slashing leader on Bright’s speech?’
“‘No; when did it appear?’
“‘Last Thursday.’
“‘Oh! my dear friend, I shall come to it by and by; but at present I am a year in arrear.’”
“Am I to understand that he intended to read up to that speech?”
“Certainly. This will illustrate the man. At his house in Leeson Street, Dublin, the hall-door was divided into two, and a knocker attached to each door. The chief-baron has been known to stand for hours, pausing to consider which knocker he would rap with, fearing to act unjustly by the unutilized one.”
“I can scarcely credit this,” exclaimed the member.
“Oh! you’ll hear of stranger things than that before you leave Ireland.” And the merry twinkle in the priest’s eye dissipated any doubts still lingering in the ponderous mind of the learned member for Doodleshire.
“That story is worthy of our—ahem!—charioteer.”
“Who? Peter O’Brien? What good company the rascal is! Of him one can safely say with Publius, Comes jucundus in via pro vehiculo est. Peter would lighten any journey. What was the subject of the debate to-day?”
“Well—ahem!—he gave us a new and original version of A Strange Adventure with a Phaeton.” And the little man chuckled at his wit.
“I know the story,” said Father O’Dowd. “It is one of Peter’s favorites, and it takes Peter to tell it.”
“From the phaeton he plunged into Home Rule.”
“Freddy,” addressing me, “you must get Peter to tell our English friend here the story of how ‘ould Casey done Dochther Huttle out av a guinea’; it’s racy of the soil.”
“There are—ahem!—some words of his that I cannot exactly follow. They are Irish, but they have quite a Saxon ring about them, which evidently shows the affinity in the languages.”
“And a further reason for uniting us. You English will never rest content until a causeway is built between Kingstown and Holyhead, garrisoned for the whole sixty miles by a Yorkshire or Shropshire regiment—one that can be depended upon.”
“That idea has been mooted in the House before now; I mean the—ahem!—connection of the two countries by a tunnel.”
“So you would bind us in the dark, Mr. Hawthorne?”
“Ha! ha! ha! Father O’Dowd, that is so good that I must book it here,” tapping his forehead in a ghastly way. “Don’t be surprised if it is heard in the House. We are very witty there.”
“If there is any wit in the House of Commons we send it to you. But I doubt if there is a sparkle of repartee among all the Irish members even. I’ve seen a French mot rehashed, with the epigram left out in the cold, and an Irish story with the point striking somewhere in Tipperary.”
“Tipperary is very Irish, is it not? They speak the Irish language there, and run their vowels into each other.”
“You are right, sir; that is the place where you’d get your two i’s knocked into one.”
Mr. Hawthorne saw this, and, although the laugh was against him, enjoyed it amazingly. Father O’Dowd could hit from the shoulder, but could also pick up his prostrate foe with the delicacy of a woman. When creed or country came up, one found a stalwart champion in the worthy priest, who could meet his adversary with shillelah or polished steel, as the requirements of the case demanded.
“Finish that glass of wine, and let me show you a set of the finest boneens in the county.”
“Boneens? What are boneens?”
“This is more of your Saxon ignorance,” laughed Father O’Dowd, as, followed by Mr. Hawthorne and myself, he led the way in the direction of the stable-yard.
TO BE CONTINUED.
OUTSIDE ST. PETER’S.
How grand the approach! The dome’s Olympian disc
Albeit has sunk behind the huge façade.
Lo! with its cross the sentinel obelisk
Salutes as on parade.
“Hewn from the red heart of primeval granite,”
It says, “among the monuments which man
Reared to outmass the mountains of his planet,
I was, ere Rome began.
“By no dark hieroglyphs my sides are storied;
My titular god, in Heliopolis,
In the world’s morning burned into my forehead
The signet of his kiss.
“Converted like an ancient scroll rewritten,
What heeds the Sun of Righteousness my date?
I lift his symbol on my brow, dawn-smitten,
And at his portal wait!”
And the twin fountains leap in joy, and twist
Their silvery shafts in foaming strength amain,
Whose loosening coil is whirled into a mist
Of sun-illumined rain.
Therein the bow of promise tenderly,
A Heart in glory, palpitates and glows;
And musically, in words of melody,
The crystal cadence flows:
“Ho! fallen ones, Eve’s sorrowing sons and daughters!
In our lustration nothing is accurst;
Ho! come ye, come ye to the living waters,
Whoever is athirst.”
The colonnaded, stately double-porch
For world-wide wanderers stretches arms of grace;
The bosom of the universal church
Draws us to her embrace.
In their white silence the apostles look
Benignantly upon us. Waving hands
Of welcome—if our tears such vision brook—
In midst the Master stands.
“Humanity,” he pleadeth, “heavy laden,
Come unto me, and I will give you rest!
Through this, my portal, to the nobler Eden
Enter, and be possessed!”
’Tis Easter; and they sing the risen Christ—
How jubilant St. Peter’s wondrous choir!
But now no vision of the Evangelist,
Preceding throne and tiar,
Is borne amid the mystic candlesticks;
No waving feathers flash with starry eyes;
In the gold chalice and the gold-rayed pyx,
For paschal sacrifice,
No pontiff consecrates the elements;
And dost remember, in the olden time,
How heaven was stormed with silver violence—
That trumpet-burst sublime,
Like cherubim in battle? Or, all sound
Tranced for the elevation of the Host,
How tingling silence thrilled through worlds profound,
Where moved the Holy Ghost,
And then Rome rocked with bells? If such things were,
They are not now. But we are strangely wrought
And vibrant, answering like a harp in air
The impalpable wind of thought.
O’er the Campagna’s wastes of feverous blight
I’ve watched St. Peter’s mighty dome expand
In soaring cycloids to the infinite,
When heaven was blue and bland.
When storm was on the mountains and the sea,
Have seen its whole empyreal glory tost
Like shipwreck on a wild immensity,
That heaved without a coast.
But it was grand through all. From far or near,
It seemed too vast for heresies or schisms;
No colored glass, within its hemisphere,
Breaks white light as with prisms.
I have dreamed dreams therein: of charity
Wide as the world, impartial as the sun;
That on such Sion, in fraternity,
Might all men meet as one.
Dreams! Yet one cross, one hope—we scarce can err—
May, must all wanderers to one fold recall:
The Apostles’ Creed, the bunch of precious myrrh,
Can purify us all.
“I have builded on a rock!” His word symbolic
He will make plain—the Eternal cannot fail:
“Earth shall not shake my One Church Apostolic,
Nor gates of hell prevail!”
FRENCH HOME LIFE.[[178]]
Philosophers, theologians, and political economists alike are agreed that the family is the basis of society and the type of government. Home life and teaching, therefore, is the most important thing in youth, and of whatsoever kind it is, so will be the behavior in riper years of the generation brought up in its precepts. If parents did their duty, the state would need fewer prisons; or, as a Chinese proverb more tersely puts it, “If parents would buy rods, the hangman would sell his implements.” Individual effort, however heroically it may make head against the stream, has but a hard and uncertain task in an atmosphere the very reverse of Christian and Scriptural, and in the teeth of laws becoming every day more and more antagonistic to the Ten Commandments. Still, since the spirit of the age has almost put on one side, as obsolete, the ideal of reverence for age and experience, and the respect due to parents, husbands, masters, and superiors, the preservation of the worthy traditions of Christian home-life falls necessarily to the hands of families themselves. We have to live not up to or within the laws, but beyond them, and to train our children not only as good and obedient citizens but as earnest and practical Christians. Not only in one country is this the case, nor even among the countries of one race, but everywhere, from modernized Japan to Spain, from Russia to the reservations of friendly Indians.
There is one country, however, whose modern literature and practice for a century and a half has been a synonym for looseness of teaching, for disregard of family ties, honor, authority, and restraint, for every element brilliantly and fatally disintegrating, for every moral and philosophical novelty. France is perhaps the nation most misrepresented and maligned by her public literature—at least the France whose delinquencies have been so shamelessly and with seeming enjoyment dissected before our eyes by her novelists and satirists. The sound body on whose surface these sores break out is ignored; the old tradition, rigid and artificial in many points, but made so by the very license of court and city which for ever assaulted its simplicity, is overlooked, and the decent, quiet, and strong substratum of manliness, truth, and purity underlying the froth of vice in the capital and the large towns is forgotten.
The first French Revolution was prepared by atheistical epicures, the airy and refined unbelievers of the court of Louis XIV. and XV.; and though turbulent masses here and there caught the infection, and with cruel precision put in practice against the court nobility the theories about which the latter so complacently wrote essays and epigrams, yet the rural populations still believed in God and virtue—the evil had not struck root among the body of the nation. The infidelity of the present century has completed the task left unfinished by Voltaire and Rousseau; newspapers have carried doubt and arrogance among the simple people of the country; the laws of partition have destroyed many homesteads once centres of families, and driven people into crowded and unhealthy cities; the example of a noisily prominent class of self-styled leaders has carried away the senses of otherwise sober and decent men; the increase of drunkenness has further loosened family and home ties; politics have become a mere profession, instead of the portion allotted by duty to the collective body of fathers of families, and so the old ideal is vanishing fast. Frenchmen of the right sort look despairingly into the far past of their own country, and into the history of foreign nations—English, American, Dutch, Hanoverian—for models of pure living, respect for authority, law-abidingness, and attachment to home. Some have set themselves to study Hindoo, Chinese, and Egyptian models, and to put together from the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes of Solomon, and the exhortations of Plato and Cicero, an ideal code of home-life; some have gathered together and published with loving regret the memorials of French life at its purest, of the patriarchal ideal which survived even till the seventeenth century—the age, pre-eminently, of great Frenchmen and women, and of which some shadows lingered into our own century. From the naïf advice of Louis IX., the saintly king of France, to his son and daughter, Philip and Isabel, to the family registers of small yeomen of Provençal valleys and the grave admonitions of a judge to his newly-married daughter just before the French Revolution, the same spirit breathes through the dying addresses of Christian fathers of families in what we only know as infidel and immoral France. “The seven thousand who bowed not the knee to Baal” were always represented, though the licentious courts of the Valois and the Bourbons threw a veil over the virtues of the country; not one class alone, but all, from the titled proprietor to the small tradesman and struggling ménager, or yeoman, contributed its quota of redeeming virtue. But it is noticeable that the majority of these upright men were poor. They could not afford to be idle; they had large families to support; they had their patrimony to keep in the family, and, if possible, to increase. All the customs that we are going to see unrolled before us, the sentiments expressed, the simple, dull, serious life led, are utterly alien from anything we call technically French. We shall be surprised at every page, but less so if we remember that this patriarchal life was generally spent in the country, and often in mountainous regions and severe climates. While reading of these scenes some may be reminded of a story placed in a singular region in the south of France,—the Camargue, not far from Aigues-Mortes—in which Miss Bowles has embodied the characteristic traits of a magnificent, healthy, hardy, and upright race. One of these Provençal farms had much in common with some described in that book.
The reason which makes the author of La Vie Domestique choose the Courtois family register as the first subject of his two volumes is that it is the latest that has come to his knowledge; and reproducing, almost in our own generation, the traits of a vanished society, it is of more interest and of greater weight as a possible model. The author of it, descended from a family of lawyers and judges at least two hundred years old, died in 1828, and his descendants still live in the valley of Sault—one of those natural republics not uncommon in mountainous districts—retired from the outer world, faithful to ancestral tradition, and governing themselves patriarchally according to their old and never-interrupted communal liberties. There is a vast field for research, and more for meditation, in the liberties of the old mediæval states north and south of the Pyrenees; it is startling to see what bold claims the parliaments of Aragon and Navarre could enforce, and their Spartan disregard of the kingly office unless joined to almost perfect virtue. But centralization, the genius of our time, has ruthlessly declared that sort of liberty antiquated, and, after the decay of the despotism which the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began, the liberty of the individual was insisted on rather than that of the commonwealth.
The valley of Sault was originally independent of any feudal duties, and though later on its lords, the D’Agoults, paid homage and fealty to the counts of Provence and then to the counts D’Anjou, they still retained the sovereign rights of coinage and independent legislation. The country is rocky and woody; for, though reckless wood-cutting decreased the forests round this commune, Sault itself remained a forest oasis, which the provident inhabitants have tried to perpetuate by planting young oaks on the barren slopes of their hills. The Courtois were assiduous planters of trees, and a grove of fairly-grown oaks formed a background to their farm buildings. Quantities of aromatic herbs grow in this neighborhood, and their distillation into essences forms an industry of the country. But the beauty that Sault chiefly lacks is that of water; for, though not far from the famous fountain of Vaucluse, there is no local stream of any importance. This is Alpine scenery without Alpine torrents. But, on the other hand, Sault has a sulphur spring, as yet only locally famous, and the meadows are green and moist. The principal natural curiosity of the valley is the Avens, a kind of rifts in the earth, like craters, which, at the rainy season, gape open and absorb floods of rain, leaving only a small portion to feed the Nesque, a tiny tributary of the Rhone. Beech, birch, and maple abound, and pasturage forms a surer road to fortune than agriculture. Yet the small freeholds are pretty equally divided, and the more advanced among the inhabitants have very clear and approved notions of practical farming. The custom of selling or exchanging the paternal acres was, till the last quarter of a century, unknown, or at least abhorred; and a local tradition dating hundreds of years back had established a modified right of primogeniture—one of the sons, generally but not necessarily the eldest, devoting himself to the care of his aged parents, the settlement of his sisters, the management of the farm, and the accumulation of a reserve fund from his income for the unforeseen necessities of the younger branches of the family. His portion in money was sometimes double, according to the Mosaic precedent, but it was understood that the Support of the House (such was the phrase) should use his advantages only for the general benefit of the family, and also that his wife’s dowry should nearly cover the deficit caused by the marriage and dowries of his sisters.
Those simple people knew nothing of laws, such as shameful excesses have made necessary in Anglo-Saxon countries, for the protection, against the husband and father, of the wife’s fortune and children’s inheritance. Antoine de Courtois, one of these model yeomen of southern France, looked upon any alienation of ancestral property, or even any use of capital, as sheer robbery of his descendants, and says in his family register: “To sell our forefathers’ land is to renounce our name and disinherit our children. Never believe that it can be replaced by other property, and remember that all those who have been ready to exchange their ancestors’ for other land have ruined themselves.... If our farm is well managed, it will always bring in more than six per cent. Any other land you could buy would not bring in three per cent., and would ruin you to improve it. You would have a decreased capital and no income, and it would break your heart.”
The description of the homestead is interesting. The buildings included the master’s house, with ten rooms on the ground-floor, eight others on the first floor, three granaries above, with a dovecote, and three cellars below; a farmer’s house, a shepherd’s, hay-barns and stables, a courtyard and fountain, a garden and orchard with over a hundred fruit-trees, a fish-pond, fifty bee-hives, and two hundred sheep. He had rebuilt much of this himself, and spent ten thousand francs on the work; and in laying some new foundations he had put his wife’s and children’s names below the corner-stone. As to farm management, he emphatically preferred and advised self-work with hired help, instead of renting the place on shares or otherwise to a farmer with a useless family. He gave very judicious rules for sowing, hoeing, harvesting, etc., and impressed upon his son the profit to be derived from bees, and the increased value of land of a certain kind, if planted with young oaks. Work he considered the only condition of happiness, as well as the road to comfort, and he said he would sooner see his sons shoemakers than idlers. The family profession was the law, though he himself in his youth studied medicine, successfully enough in theory, but not in practice, since, after losing his first patient, his scruples and disgust ended by forcing him to leave his calling. The business of a notary public was the one he recommended to his son in the choice of a profession; his family tradition led him in this groove, where, indeed, he had been preceded by some of the greatest men in France.
This choice of a state is so much a matter of custom or of personal inclination that we must carefully discern between things in the Courtois family which were models and things of indifference. Their moral qualities alone are universal types; their local customs, worthy in their own circumstances, would probably be utterly unfit for a country and race so different as ours. But Courtois’ native town, of which he was mayor for nearly twenty years, gives an example less rare in foreign countries than in either England or the United States—that of supporting an institution containing an archæological museum, a botanical collection, and a collection of local zoölogy and mineralogy, besides a library which occupies a separate building, the whole under the care of a member of the French Archæological Society, M. Henri Chrestian—an example which it would be well if our own towns of three thousand inhabitants (Sault has no more) would be public-spirited enough to follow. It is not the lack of money that debars small rural towns of such advantages; they generally contrive to keep three or four barrooms going, a dancing-hall, a Masonic hall, an annual ball and supper, half a dozen discreditable places for summer picnics, and other things either useless and showy or downright disreputable. Instead of paying money year by year for the gratification of folly and temptation to vice, and putting money in the pockets of men who deliberately trade on their fellow-men’s weakness or wickedness, why not pay a subscription the full benefits of which they reap themselves not for one day or night only in a year, but every day? Where there is a library in a small town, what books are most numerous? Trashy novels vilely illustrated, and Saturday newspapers with their ignoble, misleading, immoral tales and cuts. What a contrast to many a French, Italian, German village of three to five thousand inhabitants, or even to some of the island-villages of North Holland, remote and unvisited as they are!
Antoine de Courtois was the natural outcome of the secluded domestic atmosphere in which his family had grown up. The doctrines that led to the excesses of the Reign of Terror—for we must not confound the legal and rightful reforms of 1789 with the bloody fury of 1793—and the abuses that hurried on the great dislocation of society, had not reached his valley. In all lands where the local land-owners had remained at home and identified themselves with their neighbors, keeping only as a badge of their superiority a higher standard of honor and bravery, there was no revolt against the gentlemen. If any village followed the example of the large cities, it was sure to be owing to some scapegrace who had left home and learnt a more successful rascality among the tavern politicians of some seething city, and then come back to play Robespierre on his own small stage. Courtois married in the midst of the Revolution, in 1798, and quietly took up the task of his brother Philip, who had died suddenly without leaving any children, and whose wife, though only a bride of a few months, devoted herself all her life to the family interests. Antoine, always humane and charitable, had given shelter to two of the revolutionary commissioners, pursued by enemies of an opposite faction then uppermost, for which he was speedily denounced by an informer and imprisoned. His widowed sister-in-law travelled to Nice and besought the interference of the man he had formerly saved—the young Robespierre. A respite, then a pardon, was granted, and Antoine retired for a short time to Nice, sheltering himself behind his nominal profession of medicine, until one night the informer who had betrayed him came trembling to his door, begging him to save his life. He fed and clothed him, and gave him money to set him on his way, as well as a promise to turn his pursuers from his track should he be examined.
Such a man acted as he believed, and might say the Lord’s Prayer with a clear conscience. His equable temperament, and his firm reliance on reason as the corner-stone of morality, are very unlike what we attribute to the typical Frenchman—emotional, unreliable, fantastic, or affected; the Parisian has blotted out all worthier types from our sight. His advice to his children on their duty of consulting reason and moderation in all things, and sternly repressing mere inclination or passion, goes so far as to seem exaggerated and to banish from life even its most legitimate pleasures. But he knew the corruption pressing upon his retreat, besieging it and luring it, and to extreme evils he opposed extreme remedies. Besides, ancient custom sanctioned, or at least colored, his advice as to marriage, in which matter not only his daughters but also his son were not to choose for themselves, but let their mother choose and decide for them. He required his children to be wise beyond their years, and would fain have put “old heads on young shoulders”; but the frightful license he saw around him made the recoil only natural. Men had need to be Solomons in early youth, when hoary heads degraded themselves to play at Satyrs. Among other precepts—and there is not one that could not be matched out of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes—he insisted on the duty of neither borrowing nor lending; his teaching was inflexible on this point. “Better go shirtless than borrow money” was his maxim. In these days of lax and indiscriminate pity for all misfortune such advice sounds selfish and harsh; it belongs to the conscience of each man to interpret it and make exceptions. As to the borrowing we might be inclined to say, “Never under any circumstances”; but as to the lending there may be exceptions. In the first you fetter yourself, than which nothing is less wise; in the second you incur no obligation, and, if you can afford to lose the sum lent, there is an additional excuse. Courtois’ objection was founded on the principle he set forth elsewhere, that your property is not your own but your posterity’s, and that you have no right to diminish it. If he had had any other and absolutely personal property, the objection would have been no doubt qualified. In many cases he showed by his own example that he had no objection to give, and to be helpful to his neighbor according to his ability. He was rigidly opposed to the reading of novels, to games of chance, to balls and theatre-going; one could almost fancy one’s self listening to an old Puritan on this subject. But in this respect who is more of a Puritan than St. Jerome in his instructions to Paula for the education of her daughter? Reading consisted, with Antoine de Courtois, chiefly of the Scriptures and of the Following of Christ, that universal book of devotion, with Châteaubriand’s then recently-published Génie du Christianisme. The later development of Christian literature, less florid than Châteaubriand, might have added other books in his own language to his restricted library, but they hardly existed in his day. For instance, he would have sympathized with Joubert, who wrote: “Whenever the words altars, graves, inheritance, native country, old customs, nurse, masters, piety, are heard or said with indifference, all is lost.”
The practical and physical advantages of virtue were always before his eyes, and he never ceased showing his children how sensible and rational are the laws of God. They preserved health and gave success; they ensured happiness and kept peace. Honesty is not only the first duty of man to his fellow, but is the safest road for one’s self, and brings with it the confidence, the respect, and the love of one’s neighbors. On the subject of drunkenness it is worth while to note what a Frenchman, one of a nation of wine-drinkers—who, it is said, are so sober as opposed to a nation of ale and spirit drinkers—and of a generation long preceding any agitation on the temperance question, says in his solemn advice to his children:
“Nothing is more contemptible than drunkenness, and, in order that it may be impossible for you to fall into this sin, I advise you never to drink wine. Water-drinkers live longer and are stronger and healthier. Be sure of this: it is easy to accustom yourself to drink no wine, but, once the habit of drinking wine is formed, it costs a good deal to satisfy it, and often painful efforts to restrain it within the bounds of moderation. I never drank wine till I was five-and-thirty, and I should have done better never to drink any. Wine strengthens nothing but our passions; it wears out the body and disturbs the mind.”
He recommended work, not only as a duty but as the essential condition of happiness, and no one knows how true this is but those who have tried to do without regular employment. One often hears people wonder why so-and-so, being so rich, continues in business, and slaves at the desk instead of enjoying the fruits of his wealth. Nothing is more natural, unless a man has a taste strong enough to form an occupation, such as Schliemann had from his boyhood, and was able to indulge after he earned money enough by business to prosecute researches in the East. The leisure that some people recommend is only idleness under a veil of refinement, and no man or woman can be rationally happy unless through some special occupation which towers above all others. Doing a score of things, and giving an hour or so to each, never brings any result worth mentioning; devoting all your spare time to one pursuit strengthens the mind even where it is not needed to support the body. “If you have no profession,” says Antoine de Courtois, “you will never be anything but useless men, a burden to yourselves and a weariness to others.”
Domestic economy is another cardinal virtue of this thrifty French farmer, and the rule he prescribes—that of laying by one-sixth of one’s income to form a reserve fund, so as not to encroach on one’s capital for repairs or other unexpected expenses—is worthy of notice. Going to law, especially among relations, he utterly abhors, and advises his son, in cases of dispute, to have recourse to the arbitration of some mutual friend. On one occasion, when he was compelled to go to law against a neighbor, he mentions the suit as that of “our mill against ——’s meadow,” and takes the first opportunity to do his adversary a personal favor, carefully distinguishing between the individual and the cause. In a word, all the elements of discord and dissolution most familiar to ourselves, and too unhappily common to cause any surprise, or even to elicit more than languid blame, are, in this family register, studiously held up to execration.
Family affection, again, was not restricted to the brothers and sisters; it included all relations, and was supposed, whenever necessary, to show itself in practical help. Uncles and aunts were second fathers and mothers; god-parents were more than nominal connections; cousins were only another set of brothers and sisters. A maiden aunt, Mlle. Girard, called in the affectionate patois of Provence “our good tata,” helped to bring up Antoine’s children, and her brothers, far from wishing her to follow her first impulse, and, on account of her feeble health, take the veil in some neighboring convent, argued with her in favor of home life and duties. She died at the age of fifty-two, a holy death, as her life had been useful, humble, and charitable. Courtois himself considered marriage the natural state of man, and said that, for his part, he thought “there was no true happiness, and perhaps no salvation, outside of the married state.” But he looked upon it as so much a means to an end that he deprecated the interference of personal inclination against such practical considerations as health, virtue, becoming circumstances of fortune and station. He wisely said that one was only the steward of one’s own property, and was bound to hand it on unimpaired to one’s posterity; yet it is possible that he had too little confidence in the probably wise choice his children would make for themselves. It is true that the choice of mates by the parents provides in each generation a balance to the inability of the parents to choose for themselves in their own case—a sort of poetic retribution; and it is true also that men and women at the age of parents with marriageable children have just come to that maturity and perfection of judgment which enables them to be good guides to their sons and daughters while the latter are still in that chrysalis state when obedience is the wisest course. But such an education as he had given them should have made them more capable of discernment than others, and in his precepts there is perhaps as much of old tradition as of reaction against the subversive theories which were rending French society in pieces. How else interpret such a sweeping assertion as this: “A father is the only man a young girl need not fear”?—a withering comment, indeed, on the general state of society. On the important subject of marriage and its duties Mme. de Lamartine, the mother of the poet, has a beautiful passage in her journal, written at Milly, near Mâcon, at a small country house, whose orchards, meadows, and vineyards brought in the small income of six hundred dollars a year. On this she had a large family of sons to bring up and workmen to pay, yet the family life was as dignified and as calm as Abraham’s with his vast possessions. Her husband she calls a peerless man, “a man after God’s own heart,” and, as is often the case with the fathers of brilliant men, his character stands contrasted with that of the poet, as the oak by the side of the willow. The father of Macaulay was infinitely superior in his moral character to his amiable, genial, and gifted son—a man of iron, austerely upright, and a rock on which to depend, “through thick and thin,” but not what the world calls charming. Here is Mme. de Lamartine’s judgment, worthy to be graven in the heart of every bride as she leaves the altar:
“I was present to-day, 5th Feb., 1805, at a taking of the veil of a Sister of Mercy in the hospital at Mâcon. There was a sermon, in which the candidate was told that she had chosen a state of penance and mortification, and, as an emblem of this, a crown of thorns was put upon her head. I admired her self-sacrifice, but could not help remembering also that the state of the mother of a family, if she fulfils her duties, can match the cloistered state. Women do not think enough of it when they marry, but they really make a vow of poverty, since they entrust their fortune to their husbands, and can no longer use any of it except what he allows them to spend. We also take a vow of chastity and obedience to our husbands, since we are hereafter forbidden to seek to please or lure any other man. Over and above this we take a vow of charity towards our husbands, our children, our servants, including the duty of nursing them in sickness, of teaching them as far as we are able, and of giving them sound and Christian advice. I need not, therefore, envy the Sisters of Mercy; I have only faithfully to fulfil my duties, which are fully as arduous as theirs, and perhaps more so, since we are not surrounded by good examples, as they are, but rather by everything which would tend to distract us. These thoughts did my soul much good; I renewed my vows before God, and I trust to him to keep me always faithful to them.”[[179]]
Her life was serious and busy:
“I go to Mass every morning with my children at seven. Then we breakfast, and I attend to some housekeeping cares; then study, first the Bible, then grammar and French history—I sewing all the while.... My chief object is to make my children very pious and keep them constantly in full occupation.”
They had family prayer, too, and she says in her journal:
“It is a beautiful custom and most useful, if one would have one’s house, as Scripture recommends, a house of brethren. Nothing is so good for the mind of servants as this daily partaking with their masters in prayer and humiliation before God, who recognizes neither superiors nor inferiors. It is good for the masters to be thus reminded of Christian equality with those who are their inferiors in the world’s eyes, and the children are thus early taught to think of their true and invisible Father, whom they see their elders beseech with awe and confidence.”
The Courtois family were cousins of the Girards, one of whom, Philip de Girard, invented a flax-spinning machine in 1810, and many other mechanical improvements. In 1823 his father’s property was in danger of being sold at auction, and, having no capital but his genius, he made a contract with the Russian government, binding himself to become chief-engineer of the Polish mines for ten years. He thus saved his patrimony. A new town grew up around one of the factories established in Poland on his system, and took his name, Girardow; the present emperor has given the town a block of porphyry as a pedestal for the founder’s statue. He, too, was of the old French stock, a dutiful son and sincere Christian, schooled in tribulation in his own country, but, notwithstanding his many disappointments as an inventor, happy enough to have been buried in his own old home.
A better-known name is that of the D’Aguesseau family, a remarkable house, both for inherited piety and genius. The great chancellor of this name was a model son to a model father, and all his own children were worthy of him. Perhaps the La Ferronnays are equally fortunate; as far as their family life is revealed in A Sister’s Story, it seems cast in the same mould. Few, however, so prominent, and therefore so open to temptation, as the D’Aguesseaus have given such a sustained example of high virtue. The chancellor, whose family, always connected with the law, dated authentically from the end of the fifteenth century, was dangerously fortunate in his public career. At twenty-two he was advocate-general to the Parliament of Paris, and procurator-general at thirty-two, an orator famous all over France, a historian, a judge, a philosopher, and a writer. His name was synonymous with several important laws. He held the seals of the chancellorship for thirty-two years, and died in 1751, over eighty. His linguistic studies embraced Hebrew and Arabic—rare acquirements at that time—and he was also a good mathematician. His own saying, which he applied to his father, is no less true of himself: “The way of the righteous is at first but an imperceptible spot of light, which grows steadily by degrees till it becomes a perfect day.” Another of his maxims was that “public reform begins in home and self-reform.” His children’s education was his greatest solicitude, even among his public duties, and one gets an interesting glimpse of him in Mme. d’Aguesseau’s letters describing the business journeys of inspection on which he had to go, and which he made with his family in a big coach. The mother would open the day by prayer, and the sons then studied the classics and philosophy with their father, while even the hours of leisure were mostly filled up by reading; for the chancellor wisely taught his boys to choose subjects of interest out of school-hours, that they might not identify reading with compulsory tasks. School teaching he considered only as a basis for continued education by one’s self, and his ideal of his daughter’s education was the union of domestic deftness with scientific study. This daughter, in her turn, left to her sons advice such as truly proved her to be a mother in Israel. His wife he enthroned as a queen in his heart and his home, and would smile when others rallied him on his domestic obedience. He trusted to her for all home matters and expenses; and such women as she and those she represented were fit to be trusted.
The seventeenth century was essentially the age of great women in France, and the early part of the eighteenth still kept the tradition. Mme. de Chantal had a manly soul in a woman’s body, and yet proved herself as good a housekeeper as an administrator of her son’s estate while a minor. Prayer, work, and study went hand in hand in these women, and the D’Aguesseaus were only shining representatives of whole families and classes of noble wives and mothers. They remind one of some Scotch mothers and homes, in districts where old customs still abide; where servants are part of the family, yet never, in all their loving and rude familiarity, approach to a thought of disrespect or disobedience; where there is intense love but no demonstration; where honor and truth are loved better than life, and simplicity becomes in reality the most delicate and grave courtesy. D’Aguesseau loved farming as his chosen recreation, and vehemently denounced the rising prejudice of the young who were ashamed of their father’s simple homestead and refused to live such rustic lives. The Hebrew ideal—than which no finer has ever been invented—was his absolute standard of home-life, and how his father’s character answered to it we shall presently see. The publication of this manuscript biography and other domestic writings of the chancellor was due only to long-continued pressure, and his sons consented only with the hope of doing good to a perverse generation. In these days, when people are rather flattered than otherwise to see their names in print, even if it be only in a local sheet, many may wonder at this reticence which denoted the delicacy of this exceptional family. Whether the publication did good we can hardly judge; it must have helped to stop some on a downward career, or at least strengthened the weak resolves of some few struggling against the current.
The elder D’Aguesseau had singular natural advantages such as the majority lack, but much of this happy temperament was probably the result of generations of clean, temperate, and orderly living, such as his forefathers had been famous for. His son traces a portrait of him which seems to unite the primitive Christian with the ancient Roman:
“Exempt from all passion, one could hardly tell if he had ever had any to fight against, so calmly and sovereignly did virtue rule over his soul. I believe the love of pleasure never made him lose a single instant of his life. It even seemed as if he needed no relaxation to balance the exhaustion of his mind, and, if he allowed himself any at rare intervals, a little historical or literary reading, a short conversation with a friend, or a chat with my mother was enough to strengthen his mind for more work; but these relaxations were so few and far between that one would have thought he grudged them to himself. Ambition never disturbed his heart; for himself, he had never had any, and in his children’s careers he looked only for opportunities for them to serve their country and avoid idleness and luxury, which he considered a perpetual temptation to evil. How could avarice come near a soul so generous?... Twenty years’ labor on public works and thirty-one in the council never suggested to him the idea of asking for anything.[[180]] ... He died at the age of eighty-one, never having received any extraordinary gratuity, pension, or grant. Even his salary, in spite of his share in the distribution of the public treasury, was always the last to be paid. Mr. Desmarets, finance minister, said to me one day as we were walking in his garden: ‘I must say your father is an extraordinary man. I found out by chance that his salary has not been paid for some time, though he needs it. Why did he not tell me? He sees me every day, and he knows there is no one I would oblige sooner than him.’ I answered with a laugh that the salary never would be paid, if he waited for my father to ask for it, for he well knew that the word ask was the hardest in the world for my father to utter.... What defects could a man have who was so insensible to pleasure, ambition, even legitimate self-interest? Nearly all human weaknesses are the results of these three passions, ... and Despréaux was only literally in the right when he said of your grandfather: ‘Such a man makes humanity despair.’ He did not know justice only through the discernment of his mind; he felt it as the natural instinct and impulse of his heart, spite of all prejudices and predilections. Diffident of his own judgment, he feared the illusions of a first impulse and the snares of a hasty conclusion. Wisely lavish of his time in listening to causes and reading the memoranda of his clients, he was never contented till he had got to the smallest details of the truth, for to judge aright was the only anxiety or disturbance of mind he ever experienced. Mindful only of things in the abstract, he wholly lost sight of names and persons; and if in the exercise of his functions he was ever known to give way to emotion, it was only on behalf of endangered justice, never of individuals as such. In this there was no obstinacy or arrogance. Zeal for justice and love of truth would often so move him that he was unable to contain his thoughts, and would admonish others of the danger of trusting too much to what is erroneously called common sense, though it be so rare a gift; of the duty of learning accurately the principles of justice, and of forming one’s judgment on the experience of the wisest men.”
His gentleness and patience, his prudence and discretion, were no less conspicuous; his son says further: “No one knew men better, and no one spoke less of them.” His gentleness was a companion virtue of his courage. Apparently timid, he was yet impassible; neither moral nor physical danger awed him.
“From this mixture of justice, prudence, and bravery resulted a perfect equipoise as little in danger from variations of temper as from tempests of passion.... He was always the same, always himself, always lord of his thoughts and feelings. Hence that groundwork of moderation that kept him in an atmosphere so serene that pride never puffed him up, nor weakness degraded him, nor extreme joy upset him, nor immoderate sorrow depressed him. Duty, ever present to his mind, kept him within the bounds of the most solid wisdom, and one might epitomize his character thus: he was a living reason, quickening a body obedient to its lessons and early accustomed to bear willingly the yoke of virtue.”
Of lesser qualities, having these greater ones, he could not be destitute, and in his daily life, his eating and drinking, his recreations, his domestic relations, he was equally steady and perfect. He disliked dinner-parties especially, as involving a loss of time, though, if obliged to be at them, he never went beyond the frugal portion equivalent to his home meals; he drank so little wine that it scarcely colored the water with which he mixed it; and as to display, he was such an enemy to it that he would use only a pair of horses where his colleagues and subordinates ostentatiously used two pair. He was sickly of body, but retained his gentle and equable temperament throughout his life; his servants found him too easy to serve, so careless was he of his personal comfort; his friends, few but sincere, found in him another self, so forgetful was he of his interests in theirs. In conversation he repressed his natural turn for pleasantry, because he despised such frivolous talents; but his esprit pierced his gravity at times, and he was always a hearty laugher. Piety was inborn in him, and his faith was as childlike as his morals were pure. Scripture was his favorite reading, the Gospels especially, and his grave devotion in church was a rebuke to younger and more thoughtless men. He laid aside a tenth of his income for the use of the poor, whom he looked upon collectively as an additional child of his own; and a famine, or local distress of any kind, always found him with a reserve fund ready to help the needy. On the other hand, he practised the strictest domestic economy, and on principle shunned all display beyond what was necessary for simple comfort and the respect due to his official position. We might go further in this eulogium, but, having pointed out the steadiness of character which was peculiar to him, we need not enlarge on qualities which he shared with many weaker but still well-meaning men. All real saints are first true men; wherever an element of weakness crosses the life of a servant of God there is a corresponding flaw in his perfection. The death of Henri d’Aguesseau was worthy of his life; the consideration for others, the solicitude for some poor clients whose interests he feared would suffer through the time lost in formalities after his death, the strong reliance on God, the frequent repetition of the Psalms, “the possessing his soul in patience,” which distinguished his dying hours, all pointed to the “preciousness” which it must have worn in God’s sight.
The Chancellor d’Aguesseau walked in his father’s footsteps. Among his teachings to his son, who at nineteen was leaving home, he insists especially on the study of Holy Scripture, supplemented by a practice of marking and bringing together in writing all such passages as relate to the duties of a Christian and a public life, to serve as a body of moral precepts for his own guidance. Others, he says, have commented upon Scripture in this direction, but he does not advise his son to follow them in their methods, for “the true usefulness and value of this sort of work is only for the person himself, who thereby profits at his leisure, and imbues himself with the truths he gathers.” In his book, Reflections on Christ, he says: “The characteristic of Gospel doctrine is that it is as sublime, while it is also as simple, as one, as God himself. There is but one thing needful: to serve God, to imitate him, to be one with him. This truth includes all man’s duties.” Simplicity and uprightness, singleness of purpose and love of truth, were for him the practical synonym of religion. His father’s death he calls “simple and great”; Job’s eulogium he emphatically points out as having been that of “a man simple and upright, fearing God and eschewing evil.” Other moralists, public and private, have harped, not unnecessarily, on the same string. The Provençal poet, Frederick Mistral, adds another element to the definition of goodness—work. Brought up on a farm, among all the interests and details of agriculture and the vintage, in a household whose head was his father and teacher, and where daily family prayer and reading in common ended a day of hard work, he was a strong and rustic boy. All old customs were in vogue: the father solemnly blessed the huge Yule-log at Christmas, and then told his children of the worthy doings of their ancestors. He never complained of the weather, rebuking those who did in these words: “My friends, God above knows what he is about, and also what is best for us.” His table was open to all comers, and he had a welcome for all but idlers. He would ask if such and such a one was a good worker, and, if answered in the affirmative, he would say: “Then he is an honest man, and I am his friend.” The men and women on the farm were busy, healthy, strong, and pious. The old man had been a soldier under Napoleon, and had harbored proscribed and hunted fugitives in the Reign of Terror. His adventures were a never-ending source of interest to his family, his hired men, and to strangers. We are perhaps wrong in saying so, but there is always a tendency, when we see or hear of such men, to say: “There are none such now.” Certainly there are fewer, but in every age the same lament has been raised. The “good old times,” if you pursue them closely, vanish into the age of fable; yet in hidden corners one may always find some of their representatives, and goodness, alas! has always been exceptional. M. Taine, in his Sources of Contemporary France, wisely says: “In order to become practical, to lord it over the soul, to become an acknowledged mainspring of action, a doctrine must sink into the mind as an accepted, indisputable thing, a habit, an established institution, a home tradition, and must filter through reason into the foundations of the will; then only can it become a social force and part of a national character.” Unfortunately, it takes centuries, or at least generations, to produce such results; but the continual and unchanging teaching of religion, running parallel to, and yet distinct from, all local changes of circumstance, may often supply much of this natural tradition. In the sixteenth century Olivier de Serres, in a manual of agriculture, touches on the duties of a landholder, and the old principles of the Bible are revived in his archaic French. He bids masters, “according to their gifts, exhort their servants and laborers to fly sin and follow virtue.”
“He (the master) shall show them how industry profits every business, specially farming, by means of which many poor men have built houses; and, on the other hand, how by neglect many rich families have been ruined. On this subject he shall quote the sayings of the wise man, ‘that the hand of the diligent gathers riches,’ and that the idler who will not work in winter will beg his bread in summer. Such and like discourses shall be the ordinary stock of the wise and prudent father of a family concerning his men, whence also he will learn to be the first to follow diligence and virtue, and to let no word of blasphemy, of lasciviousness, of foolishness, or of backbiting ever pass his lips, in order that he may be a mirror of all modesty.”
Gerebtzoff’s History of Ancient Russian Civilization gives curious details of the patriarchal rules of life in that country, the respect lavished on parents and elders, the early-imbibed love of truth, and the familiar use of proverbs embodying these doctrines. Why do these things seem new to us, or at least why is their repetition so necessary? St. Marc Girardin, lecturing at the Sorbonne thirty years ago on the fifth chapter of Proverbs, distrusted the effect on his audience of youths “of the period.” He handled the subject manfully, but so well that his audience caught his own enthusiasm and rained down applause on those noble, ancient Hebrew maxims, so dignified in theory, so beautiful in practice. But if the world would not listen to such teaching, the same precepts would meet it unawares in the books of classic writers—in the Republic of Plato, in the speeches of Cicero, the Politics of Aristotle, in the laws of Solon. The ancients constantly startle us with their maxims of more than human virtue; much of their heathen teaching puts to shame the practice of their pseudo-Christian successors. Those among them who do not uphold piety, filial respect, obedience, and faith belong to a time when literature as well as morals was degenerating; but it would have required a Sardanapalus in literature to teach unblushingly what Rousseau taught to the most polished society of Europe. All law is contained in the Ten Commandments, and in China, relates one of the missionaries whose “letters,” unpretentious as they are, are the greatest help to science, a committee of learned men, on being ordered to report flaws in Christian doctrine, said they had considered well, but dared not do it, for all the essential doctrine was already contained in their own sacred books, the King. Again, Christian practice in old times revived the precept of Deuteronomy to bear the commandments “on the wrist, and engrave them on the threshold of the house and the lintel of the door” (Deut. vi. 6–9). In Luneburg, Hanover, a farm-house built in 1000, and which for six hundred years has been in the family of its present owner, a small yeoman, Peter Heinrich Rabe, has this text over the door: “The blessing of God shall be thy wealth, If, mindful of naught else, thou art Faithful and busy in the state God has given thee, And seekest to fulfil all thy duties. Amen.” English and Dutch, German and French, houses have more or less such decorations and reminders on their walls; churches abounded with them, and men and women wore illuminated texts as jewels. The immutable law of which Cicero, in his Republic, gives a definition worthy of the Bible, and to deny which, he says, is to fly from one’s self, deny one’s own nature, and be therefore most grievously tormented, even if one escapes human punishment; the law of conscience, of which a Chinese family register says: “Nothing in the world should turn your heart away from truth one hair’s breadth,” and “If you set yourself above your conscience, it will avenge itself by remorse; heaven and earth and all the spirits will be against you”; the law which Père Gratry resumed in three passages of Scripture: “Increase and multiply, and possess the earth,” “Man is put on earth to set order and justice in the world,” and “Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all things else shall be added unto you”; the law which Garron de la Bévière, a victim of the Revolution, though himself a sincere advocate of liberty, translates thus: “He who knows not how to suffer knows not how to live”; that law which does not deal only in magnificent generalities, but carries its dignity into the smallest details of practical life, so that Père de Ravignan could apply it from the pulpit of Notre Dame to the sore point of a fashionable audience whom he startled by asking if they paid their debts—that law was the shield and the groundwork of the heroic old family life of French provinces. Simple tradesmen and untaught peasants lived under it as blamelessly as gentlemen and statesmen, and taught their sons the same traditions, the same honesty, the same truth, the same deference to their conscience, the same fear of evil for evil’s sake, and not for the punishments it involves or the misfortunes it often brings on. The custom of keeping family registers is a very old one; even before St. Louis’ famous instructions to his children it was common: Bayard’s mother left him a similar manual, and people of all conditions made a practice of it. From these documents, and the sentiments written in them from time to time by fathers for the guidance of their children, M. de Ribbe has collected many memorials of domestic life in France—chiefly in remote and happy neighborhoods, but also in more populous and disturbed ones; and the sameness of the precepts in all is less strange than the likeness they bear to those of the Chinese family books, which date back often more than 2,000 years. He has found in the recently-discovered papyri in Egyptian tombs the same eternal rules, set forth in language almost equal to the simple grandeur of the Bible, while the Hindoo hymns and books of morals teach in many instances the same truths in nearly the same words.