Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

This example will suffice.

The goodness of man appears to him to be more apparent than ever. "I repeat, for the consolation of the human race, moral evil is as foreign to man as physical evil, both only spring from a deviation from the natural law. Nature made man good." This goodness would be plain to all at once if they would put into practice M. de Saint-Pierre's plan of education, and it could hardly be put off much longer. "A day will come, and I already see its dawn, when Europeans will substitute in the hearts of their children the wish to serve their fellow-creatures for the fatal ambition to be the first amongst them, and when they will recognise that the interest of each of them is the interest of the human race."

A few new scientific ideas come in to prove that the author is incorrigible on this point. "If the forces of the vegetable kingdom reflect and augment the heat of the sun, if they effect the atmosphere and the water, they have no less influence upon the solid globe of the earth, of which they extend the circumference from year to year. It is quite certain that each plant leaves upon the globe a solid and permanent deposit, and that it is out of the sum total of these vegetable remains that the circumference of the globe is annually augmented." We could have pardoned him this theory before the works of Lavoisier, but coming after, they betray a greater amount of ignorance than can be allowed even to a poet in speaking of science.

He has also an extraordinary theory upon the chemical composition of the sun. "If it were allowed to a being as limited as I am to dare to speculate about a star which I have not even had the happiness to see through a telescope, I should say that the material of which it is composed is gold, because gold is the heaviest of all known metals; which would apply to the sun placed in the centre of our universe.... Its light ... gilds every object that it strikes, and seems to be volatilised gold.... We are assured that it forms the gold in the depths of the earth." Mystical reasons confirm Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in his opinion. "Gold is the prime mover in societies of human beings as the sun is in the universe. Gold sets in motion all social harmonies amongst civilised as well as uncivilised peoples."

It is always through sentiment that he makes his scientific discoveries. "Evidence is but the harmony of the soul with God ... thus the mind has no science if the heart has no conscience. Certainty is then after all a sentiment, and this sentiment is only the result of the laws of nature.... I should then define science as the sentiment of the laws of nature in relation to man.... This definition of science in general applies to all sciences in particular.... Astronomy ... is only the feeling of the laws which exist between the stars and men."

In virtue of "the laws which exist between the stars and men," he knows that the other planets are inhabited, and he could describe their Fauna and Flora, their landscapes, and the manners of the inhabitants. The men on the planet Mercury are philosophers; those on Venus "must give up all their time to love," to the dance, to festivals and songs. The character of those of Jupiter no doubt resembles that of the maritime peoples of Europe; "they must be industrious, patient, wise, and thoughtful, like the Danes, the Dutch, and the English." On all the planets, the souls of the just fly away after death into the sun, where they are better placed than anywhere else for enjoying a view of the whole universe. "It is there without doubt that you are, unfortunate Jean-Jacques, who, having reached the end of this life, behold a new one in the sun!" It is there that Bernardin hopes to go to find again his master, and from whence in spirit he sees himself throwing "a triumphant glance to earth where men weep, and where he is no longer." So ends the Harmonies de la Nature in a sort of ecstasy.

It is deadly dull reading. You are soon surfeited, as after a feast of nothing but sweet dishes. There is too much feeling, too much happiness; the world is too well-arranged and engineered, too highly coloured and varnished. One agrees in the judgment which the book inspired in Joubert: "Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's style is like a prism which tires the eyes. After one has read him for long one is charmed to see that the grass and trees have less colour in nature than they have in his writings. His harmonies make us love the discords which he banishes from the world, and which one comes across at every step. Nature certainly has her music, but happily it is rare. If reality afforded the melodies which these gentlemen find everywhere, one would live in an ecstatic languor, and die of inanition."

The works which succeeded to the Harmonies de la Nature are not worth spending time over any more than his posthumous ones.[26] When we have excepted the Café de Surate, a charming satirical tale of a few pages, and the fragments on J. J. Rousseau, upon which we have drawn largely in retracing the history of their acquaintance, we may dispense with reading the rest. On the whole Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is complete in a single book, the Études de la Nature, on condition that we take one of the copies perfected by the addition of Paul and Virginia.

His last years were the happiest of his long career. They were passed innocently in observing his flowers, adoring his young wife, and in realising at last on paper his project of an ideal colony, without fatigue or expense. It was the best way. He occupied himself every day for an hour or two in organising it according to the laws of nature, bringing up the children there to the sound of horns and flutes, and obtaining results without a precedent, which he recorded in the annals of the young state.[27]