[173] Histoire, tom. vii, Renaissance, introd. § 6. [↑]
[174] M. Faguet writes (Études sur le XIXe Siècle, p. 352) that “Michelet croit à l’âme plus qu’à Dieu, encore que profondément déiste. Les théories philosophiques modernes lui étaient pénibles.” This may be true, though, hardly any evidence is offered on the latter head; but when M. Faguet writes, “Est-il chrétien? Je n’en sais rien ... mais il sympathise avec la pensée chrétienne,” he seems to ignore the preface to the later editions of the Histoire de la révolution française. To pronounce Christianity, as Michelet there does, essentially anti-democratic, and therefore hostile to the Revolution, was, for him, to condemn it. [↑]
[175] Letter to Sainte-Beuve, cited by Levallois, Sainte-Beuve, 1872, p. 14. [↑]
[176] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 951. [↑]
[177] “L’incrédulité de Sainte-Beuve était sincère, radicale, et absolue. Elle a été invariable et invincible pendant trente ans. Voilà la vérité” (Jules Levallois, Sainte-Beuve, 1872, préf. p. xxxiii). M. Levallois, who writes as a theist, was one of Sainte-Beuve’s secretaries. M. Zola, who spoke of the famous critic’s rationalism as “une négation n’osant conclure,” admitted later that it was hardly possible for him to speak more boldly than he did (Documents Littéraires, 1881, pp. 314, 325–28). And M. Lavisse has shown (as cited above, p. 406) with what courage he supported Duruy in the Senate against the attacks of the exasperated clerical party. See also his letter of 1867 to Louis Viardot in the avant-propos to that writer’s Libre Examen: Apologie d’un Incrédule, 6e édit. 1881, p. 3. [↑]
[178] That Wordsworth was not an orthodox Christian is fairly certain. Both in talk and in poetry he put forth a pantheistic doctrine. Cp. Benn, Hist. of Eng. Rationalism, i, 227–29; and Coleridge’s letter of Aug. 8, 1820, in Allsopp’s Letters, etc., of S. T. Coleridge, 3rd ed. 1864, pp. 56–57. [↑]
[179] Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, p. 27. [↑]
[180] Mr. Benn (Hist. of Eng. Rationalism, i, 226, 309 sq.) has some interesting discussions on Scott’s relation to religion, but does not take full account of biographical data and of Scott’s utterances outside of his novels. The truth probably is that Scott’s brain was one with “watertight compartments.” [↑]
[181] At the age of twenty-five we find him writing to Gifford: “I am no bigot to infidelity, and did not expect that because I doubted the immortality of man I should be charged with denying the existence of God” (letter of June 18, 1813). [↑]
[182] By the Court of Chancery, in 1822, the year in which copyright was refused to the Lectures of Dr. Lawrence. Harriet Martineau, History of the Peace, ii, 87. [↑]