“This consideration teaches us that tillage, as an object of national care and encouragement, is universally preferable to pasturage, because the kind of provision which it yields goes much farther in the sustentation of human life. Tillage is also recommended by this additional advantage—that it affords employment to a much more numerous peasantry. Indeed pasturage seems to be the art of a nation, either imperfectly civilised, as are many of the tribes which cultivate it in the internal parts of Asia, or of a nation, like Spain, declining from its summit by luxury and inactivity.”[192]
Elsewhere Paley asserts that “luxury in dress or furniture is universally preferable to luxury in eating, because the articles which constitute the one are more the production of human art and industry than those which supply the other.”
XXXII.
ST. PIERRE. 1737–1814.
PRINCIPALLY known as the author of the most charming of all idyllic romances—Paul et Virginie. Beginning his career as civil engineer he afterwards entered the French army. A quarrel with his official superiors forced him to seek employment elsewhere, and he found it in the Russian service, where his scientific ability received due recognition.
Encouraged by the esteem in which he was held, he formed the project of establishing a colony on the Caspian shores, which should be under just and equal laws. St. Pierre submitted the scheme to the Russian Minister, who, as we should be apt to presume, did not receive it too favourably. He then went to Poland in the vain expectation of aiding the people of that hopelessly distracted country in throwing off the foreigners’ yoke. Failing in this undertaking, and despairing, for the time, of the cause of freedom, we next find him in Berlin and in Vienna. He had also previously visited Holland, in which great refuge of freedom he had been received with hospitality. In Paris, upon his return to France, his project of a free colony found better reception than in St. Petersburg—owing, perhaps, to the not altogether disinterested sympathy of the Government with the recently revolted American colonies. To further his plans he accepted an official post in the Ile de France, intending eventually to proceed to Madagascar, where was to be realised his long-cherished idea. On the voyage he discovered that his associates had formed a very different design from his own—to engage in the slave traffic. Separating from these nefarious speculators, he landed in the Ile de France, where he remained two years. It is to the experiences of this part of his life that we owe his Paul et Virginie, the scenes of which are laid in that tropical island.
Returning home once again, he made the acquaintance of D’Alembert and of other leading men of letters in Paris, and, particularly, of Rousseau, his philosophical master. At the period of the Great Revolution of 1789, St. Pierre lost his post as superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens under the old Bourbon Government, and he found himself reduced to poverty; and although his sympathies were with the party of constitutional, though not of radical, reform, the supremacy of the extreme revolutionists (1792–1794) exposed him to some hazard by reason of his known deistic convictions. Upon the establishment of the reactionary revolution of the Empire, St. Pierre recovered his former post, and, with the empty honour of the Imperial Cross, he received the more solid benefit of a pension and other emoluments.
His writings have been collected and published in two quarto volumes (Paris, 1836). Of these, after his celebrated romance, perhaps the most popular is La Chaumière Indienne (“The Indian or Hindu Cottage”). His principal productions are Etudes de la Nature (“Studies of Nature”), Vœux d’un Solitaire (“Aspirations of a Recluse”), Voyage à L’Ile de France (“Voyage to Mauritius”), and L’Arcadie (“Arcadia”). His merits consist in a certain refinement of feeling, in charming eloquence in description of natural beauty, and in the humane spirit which breathes in his writings. Of the Paul et Virginie he tells us—
“I have proposed to myself great designs in that little work.... I have desired to reunite to the beauty of Nature, as seen in the tropics, the moral beauty of a small society of human beings. I proposed to myself thereby to demonstrate several great truths; amongst others this—that our happiness consists in living according to Nature and Virtue.”