Also, the very interesting catalogue of her limited bookshelf contains some authors of distinctly profane persuasion, whom she does not always shun. Victor Hugo fascinates her. Sometimes, indeed, the quality of the text forces her to confine her attention to the pictures, but again she is wrapt by the adventures of Jean Valjean and the flamboyant mediævalism of “Notre Dame de Paris.” She tries to break a long day by an exciting novel, picks “The Chamber of Poisons” for its title, but finds only disappointments, pet toads, Jesuits turned into hobgoblins, big names in petty places. She has no taste for poisons, she says. Or again, she turns to Sainte-Beuve’s “Volupté,” having been assured by her confessor that pure minds may pass untainted through strange regions. She likes the book, not perhaps wholly fathoming its depths of morbid suggestiveness. But the best is Molière. She tries him once, is delighted, and means to read more. Now what could be further apart than the worlds of Molière and Eugénie de Guérin?
But, in the main, she reads the writers of this life only to condemn them. Bossuet, Pascal, the Fathers, the “Imitation,” are her daily and nightly company. Such books are all that Christians should read or even recognize. As for the general diffusion of book-learning and education, she deplores it with the real obscurantism of mediæval superstition. The peasants, she says, were once simple-minded, earnest, reverent, devout. Now they go to school, they read the newspapers, they acquire the superficial jargon of modern culture, and as a consequence they are atheistic in their talk and immoral in their lives.
The same intense and constant preoccupation with the mystical point of view that affected Mademoiselle de Guérin’s intellectual pursuits entered into her æsthetic enjoyments. Art in its technical form was completely out of her world. She probably saw pictures with the other curiosities of Paris, but they made no appeal, and churches to her were churches, not in any way creations of architectural art. Music alone she approaches with a sort of groping sense of its vast emotional possibility. But as to this she would undoubtedly have agreed with Cowper that all music not directly intended and employed for the worship of God was corrupting, enervating, debasing. “Oh, if I knew music!” she cries, in a moment of enthusiasm. “They say it is so good for the disorders of the soul.” Yet it does not touch her. “Nothing in the world has such power to move and stimulate the soul. I know it, but I do not feel it.” And a similar experience calls forth words profoundly characteristic for more than music. “I listened to wonders, yet nothing astonished me. Is there then no astonishment save in heaven?”
But there was one region of beauty in which Eugénie’s soul opened and flowered with the most exquisite delicacy and sensibility of response and that was the world of nature. The subtle, dreamy, suggestive landscape of France, which has meant so much to poets and painters, has rarely been felt or rendered with more perfection than by this simple girl who spent her life with flowers and birds and clouds and stars. “I tried to begin a letter to you yesterday,” she says, “but I could not write. All my soul was at the window.” How often her soul was at the window, all ears, all eyes, stirred to wild joy or grief by the breath of light winds, or the dance of blossoms in sunshine, or the drift of autumn leaves. Now it is fair spring weather that delights her, now it is the long and wind-swept rains of autumn. The vast tranquillity of summer nights at times befits her mood. And again she welcomes the tumult of great storms and cries out for even thunder to jar the too monotonous quiet. Not the heart of Keats or Shelley was more vividly, more blissfully or painfully, at one with little sounds, or fleeting sights, or unknown odors that vanish as quickly as they come.
She reads Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s description of the strawberry vine, which, he says, would make matter for a volume, with all its relations and experiences. “I,” she says, “am like the strawberry vine, bound up with earth and air and sky, with the birds, with so many things, visible and invisible, that I should never get through describing them, without counting what lives hidden in the folds of my heart, like the insects that dwell in the thickness of a leaf.” And again, “I wish my heart did not feel the condition of the air and of the season so much that it opens and closes like a flower with cold or sun. I don’t understand it, but so it is, so long as the soul is encased in this frail habitation of the body.”
But nature is never all to her, never enough for her. She must have God. Either she sees Him as the whole life and beauty of it all, hears his voice in the breeze and in the storm, feels his hand in the motion of flowers and of stars, or she turns away from the beauty of earth as too apt to distract from the beauty of heaven. “The sky to-day is pale and languid like a fair face after a fever. This look of languor is full of charm. The blending of greenness and decay, of flowers that open with flowers that fall, of singing birds and creeping brooks, the breath of storm and May sunshine mingled, give an effect of fine fabrics ruffled and tossed together, of sad and sweet at once, which fills me with delight. But this is Ascension day: let us leave earth and earth’s skies; let us rise above our fragile dwelling place and follow where Christ has gone before us.” In another mood the quiet, subtle sounds of night seem to penetrate devotion with an overpowering tenderness, to waft thought higher even than meditation undisturbed. “It is black night. But you can still hear the crickets, the streamlet, and the nightingale, just one, which sings, sings, sings, in the thick darkness. What a perfect accompaniment to evening prayer!”
I said in beginning that Mademoiselle de Guérin had no active personal life of her own. This is as true of her as perhaps of any of us. She followed the thought of others and of God as the shadow follows the sun. At the same time, she was human, she was a woman, she was made of earth, as we all are. It is a study of exceeding interest to watch the stirrings of humanity, even barely perceptible and quickly crushed, in this white, pure vessel filled with the glow of an unearthly adoration.
Revolt she seems to have had none, doubt none, or only such momentary dimming of the pure flame as serves to make it shine the brighter. It does indeed trouble her a little to reflect that just those consolations which the poor need are given only to the rich who need them not. Life, she says, seems inside out and upside down, which was the view of Prometheus and of Satan, but in Mademoiselle de Guérin it does not strike us as Satanic. Also, her questioning of the divine order goes so far as a regret that she cannot have her doves in heaven. But this pulls her up with a shock, for in heaven we shall regret nothing—not even doves.
Some shreds of human frailty, some lingering hints of impatience and irritability and nerves, we are pleased to find that even this saint shares with us. How subtly and charmingly does she analyze them herself. “I am not in the mood to write or to do anything amiable: quite the contrary. There are days when the soul shuts itself up like a hedgehog. If you were here, how I would prick you.” And again, in a little different phase. “I am most unsuccessful in dealing with difficulties, and am always in too great a hurry to get at what is to give me pleasure.”
Also, I wonder whether her friends really got near her and felt at ease with her. Monsieur Anatole France speaks charmingly of la douceur impérieuse des saintes. Had Mademoiselle de Guérin’s infinite gentleness sometimes a touch of the imperious? I can hardly prove it. It is rare and subtle and indefinable. But I divine it—a little. She remarks, with beatific triumph, “I speak to everybody I love of the things of eternity.” She did. She did. And it seems merely prophetic despair to imply that the things of eternity might grow tiresome. But in this world we are contented only with eternal change.