Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

He hesitated because he did not know how to set to work. He thought he saw a manner of describing nature for which he knew of no models; and instead of trusting to himself, he appealed to his writers, who could do nothing for him. In the Harmonies de la Nature, his last great work, into which he put all his fragments, there is a rhetorical lecture upon the rules of landscape painting, which bears witness to the care with which he had analysed the methods of Virgil. In it Saint-Pierre explains to some imaginary pupils the means employed by the poet to obtain the desired effect: "When Virgil tells us, 'The ash-tree is very beautiful in the woods, the poplar on the banks of the rivers,' he puts the tree in the singular and the site in the plural, in order to enlarge his horizon. If he had put the vegetation in the plural, and the sites in the singular, they would not have had the same scope. He would have contracted his different scenes if he had said: 'The ash-trees are very beautiful in a wood; the poplars on the bank of a river.' The lines of the picture once fixed, Virgil throws the flash of light upon his landscape, and it appears either sad or smiling. He succeeds in enlivening it with bees, swans, birds and flocks; or in saddening it by painting it desolate. A landscape is always melancholy when it includes nothing but the primitive forces of nature."

It is a subtle piece of observation, but the feeling for nature which was awakening in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and for which he was striving to find expression, was more complicated than that of Virgil. Neither the Eclogues nor the Georgics taught him anything about what were to be the great novelties of descriptive literature. The ancients did not feel this need for precise and picturesque detail, which has enabled us to take the portrait of a corner of country as we do that of a person, with the same minutiæ, and the same care about the resemblance. On the other hand, they had little of the intuition for that mysterious correspondence between the scene and the spectator, for that reciprocal action of nature upon our feelings, and of our feelings upon the manner in which we look upon nature that in our day gives so personal an emphasis to literary pictures of scenery, and can lend a tragedy to the description of a bit of meadow. The only one of the Greek or Latin writers, who has described the relations of our souls with the world around us, has done it magnificently; but Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had not read him. He was a Father of the Church of the fourth century, Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, some of whose pages make us think of Chateaubriand.

"Yesterday, tortured by my regrets, I seated myself under the shade of a thick wood, eating my heart in solitude; for in trouble this silent communing with one's soul is a consolation that I love. From the tree-tops where the breeze murmured, and the birds were singing, gladdened by the sunlight, there fell a soft influence of sleep. The grasshoppers hidden in the grass echoed through the wood, a clear stream softly gliding through its cool glades bathed my feet; as for me, I remained pre-occupied with my grief, and had no care for these things; for when the soul is overwhelmed with sorrow it cannot yield itself up to pleasure. In the tumult of my troubled heart, I spoke aloud the thoughts which were contending within me: 'What have I been? What am I? What shall I become? I know not. One wiser than I knows no better. Lost in clouds I wander to and fro; having nothing, not even the dream of what I desire.'"[9]

One might urge that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had not read the poets of the sixteenth century any more than the Fathers of the Church. It was not the fashion of his day, and he was not the sort of man to go and explore the libraries; he was too much occupied in making discoveries in the fields. Like almost all his contemporaries, he jumped from antiquity to the seventeenth century with only Montaigne in the interval. After Homer, Virgil, the Gospel, and Plutarch, his intellectual sustenance had been Racine, La Fontaine, Fénélon, and at last coming to his contemporaries, Jean Jacques Rousseau. In vain he questioned them upon the idea which pursued him; not one of them gave him a satisfactory answer. Racine, who they say was enchanted with the valley of Port Royal, had had no room in his tragedies for word pictures. La Fontaine had more the feeling for the country than for nature. Fénélon saw the woods and the fields from the point of view of the ancients. We have purposely not mentioned Buffon; Bernardin did not understand or appreciate him.

There remained Rousseau, who loved the beauty of the universe with all his passionate heart; but the fine descriptions of Rousseau appear in his posthumous works—in the Confessions and the Reveries which were published, it is well to insist upon this, nine years after the Voyage to the Isle of France. The celebrated landscapes in La Nouvelle Heloïse, which Saint-Pierre had certainly studied, have about them something conventional, which makes them appear cold. Call to mind Saint-Preux in the mountains of Valais:

"Here immense rocks hung in ruins above my head; there high and thundering cascades drenched me with their thick mist; again, an eternal torrent would open beside me an abyss, of which my eyes did not dare to sound the depths. Sometimes I lost myself in the obscurity of a thick wood. Sometimes on emerging from a ravine my eyes would suddenly be rejoiced by a pleasant plain. An astonishing admixture of wilderness and cultivation showed everywhere the hand of men, where one would have thought that they had never penetrated: beside a cavern you found houses, dried vine branches where one only sought brambles, vines growing upon landslips, excellent fruit upon rocks, and fields in the midst of precipices."

In this bit, almost all the adjectives are abstract. The torrent is eternal, the meadow agreeable, the fruits excellent. It is still in the style of Poussin, and nothing in it foretells the pictures in the manner of Corot and Théodore Rousseau, which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was soon to give to us. Let us say at once, in order to establish the claim of the author of Paul and Virginia to the character of an innovator and pioneer, that the posthumous works of Jean Jacques only give us his own impressions of a picture which he suggests rather than shows to us. The immortal summer night of the Confessions, on the road near Lyons, or the walk to Ménilmontant of the Reveries, after the vintage and through the leafless country, leave in the memory recollections of sensations rather than pictures. One recalls a breeze of voluptuous warmth, a soft light of autumn; but the physiognomy of the country escapes us. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre will be the first to paint it for us accurately. Just because he is much less great than his glorious predecessor, we must give him his due, and insist upon his originality.

Thus thrown upon his own resources, and finding by great good fortune no one to imitate, he decided to take up the pen, and wrote, as well as he could, and with many erasures, his Voyage to the Isle of France. He had succeeded in sufficiently clearing up his ideas to know very well what he wanted to do. He had two objects in view: in the first place he wished to awaken a love of nature amongst the public. "By dint of familiarising ourselves with the arts," he says in The Voyage, "Nature becomes alien to us; we are even so artificial that we call natural objects curiosities." He was shocked that the multitude who became enamoured of the works of men could pass by the works of God without seeing them, and he boasted for his part that he "preferred a vine-stock to a column ... the flight of a gnat to the colonnade of the Louvre." Moreover, he could not understand how one could separate man from his surroundings, from the air which he breathed, the soil which he trod upon, the plants and animals which were about him. "A landscape," he says in his preface, "is the background of the picture of human life."

The second object of his work was in his eyes still more important than the first. The awakening of a love of nature amongst men was not to be a simple artistic pleasure. Saint-Pierre designed to make use of it to teach these same multitudes to seek evidences of the Divinity elsewhere than in books. He wished to restore to the France of the philosophers the sense of the presence of God in the universe, and the best way to do it seemed to him to be to draw attention towards the marvels of creation. No argument in his eyes was worth a day passed in the fields in looking at what was about him and at his feet. "Nature," he wrote, "presents such ingenious harmonies, such benevolent designs; mute scenes so expressive and little noticed, that if one could present even a feeble picture of them to the most thoughtless man, he would be forced to exclaim, 'There is some moving spirit in all this.'" In another place he apologises himself for having written about plants and animals without being a naturalist, and he adds: "Natural history not being confined to the libraries it seemed to me that it was a book wherein all the world might read. I have thought I could perceive the tangible evidence of the existence of a Providence, and I have spoken of it, not as a system which amuses my mind but as a feeling of which my heart is full."

We notice in the two last lines the avowal, as yet timid and obscure, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's favourite maxim, the key to all his schemes philosophical, scientific, political, or educational. He always strove, and more and more openly as he gained reputation and authority, to persuade the world that feeling is ever a better guide than reason in all questions, and that it gives us greater certainty. He himself gave an example in applying it to everything, and in particular to the truths of religion. We should say truthfully, that he was sufficiently of his day, sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the encyclopædists to believe himself already conquered if he appealed to reason in favour of God. He thought it safest to address himself to the feelings of the reader rather than to his intelligence, in order to reconcile him with a personage so little in favour.