Alas, no, it does not last. These ecstasies never do, whether earthly or heavenly, unless in heaven. And persons who spend their lives in waiting for them are apt to view the common, petty joys of earth with discontent. This was unquestionably the case with Mademoiselle de Guérin. A word less frequent than God in her Journal is ennui, but it is frequent enough. People bore her, society bores her, little daily duties bore her. She endures them and keeps a brave face because God bids, but the ennui is there just the same.
Nor is it only ennui. She sees a vast amount of positive evil in life. “Pessimism is half of saintliness,” says an excellent authority. It was at least half of Mademoiselle de Guérin’s. Besides general human suffering and cruelty and neglect, she has a set of individual troubles which seem avoidable, some doubt as to her own salvation and very considerable doubt as to the salvation of others. These things keep dark clouds over her until the sun has hard work to break through. She speaks perpetually of graves and death, always, to be sure, to draw a moral lesson from them; but cannot moral lessons be drawn from sweeter things? Even the great Christian poet, Donne, while expressing a preference for the grave, found other matters more attractive still.
“I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay
With graves than cradles to wear out a day.”
But Mademoiselle de Guérin is more than “half in love with easeful death” and inclines to woo him with all the strange fancies of Constance in “King John.” “Hippolyte talks to me of Marie, of another world, of his grief, of you, of death, of all the things I love so much.”
One is inclined to break in on a strain so morbid and abnormal with reminders of “earthlier happy is the rose distilled,” or with the somewhat brutal Philistinism of Horace Greeley’s comment on his dear friend, Margaret Fuller, “A good husband and two or three bouncing babies would have emancipated her from a good deal of cant and nonsense.”
But, though Mademoiselle de Guérin might herself have been happier as a normal wife and mother, she would not have left us the fine, elaborate analysis of an exquisite soul.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.