Confessions of a Book-Lover

by Maurice Francis Egan

Maurice de Guérin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in his religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and director, Père de Lamennais—the "M. Féli" of the little paradise of la Chénie. To the delight of some of the more independent and emancipated of the literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Maurice was becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost equally adored, and this gave Eugénie great pain, although it did not change her love or make a rift in her belief in him.

De Guérin is a singing poet in a language which is used by few singing poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the "Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It

was not strange that the great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Guérin somewhat too unusual. Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate talk." Eugénie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Trébutien's "Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Guérin." It would be folly for me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with the atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of Eugénie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most beautiful of all love songs—"Come into the Garden, Maud!"

One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so imitative—and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in the gardens of

the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre. Tennyson, like De Guérin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage, and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both Maurice de Guérin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical, the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is this!—Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, Keats, Madame de Sévigné, Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion—and yet they are all related.

In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.

The received methods of "teaching" the classics in what people call "the dead languages"

nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, while they may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favourite process of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth honestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallen in order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of this teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived and died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr. Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, managed to make the Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that the Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, which he admitted were full of colour and life, were by comparison faded and pale in the glow and aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to describe them!

The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hard work, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Guérin's "Centaure," to read

joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. While browsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels of Tourguéneff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I found Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think has now become the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! The Mimes of Herondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in these poems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among the hard workers at the "Classics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman from Oxford who gave us lessons three or four times a week and held that, when we were able to translate at sight a certain page of Greek which he had composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect, treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, in merciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases, very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, and partly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman said was too paraphrastic. It is from the "Cyclops":