"I feel," continues M. Michelet, with great tenderness—"I feel I am alone, and I should be sad indeed if I had not with me my faith and hope. I see myself weak, both by nature and my previous works, in presence of this mighty subject, as at the foot of a gigantic monument, that I must move all alone. Alas! how disfigured it is to-day; how loaded with foreign accumulations, moss, and mouldiness; spoilt by the rain and mud, and by the injuries it has received from passengers! The painter, the man of art for art, comes and looks at it; what pleases him is precisely that moss. But I would pluck it off. Painter, now passing by! This is not a plaything of art—this is our altar!"
"To know the life of the people, their toils and sufferings," he continues, "I have but to interrogate my own memory." He has himself sprung from the labouring population. Before he wrote books, he composed them in the literal sense of that term. He arranged letters before he grouped ideas; the sadness of the workshop, and the wearisomeness of long hours, are things known to his experience. The short narrative of his early struggles forms another beautiful passage in this singular and very unequal production. The great lesson which he brought with him from his season of difficulty and affliction, is one that authorizes him to approach the people as a teacher and a friend, and ought to have inspired him with nobler aims than he puts forth to-day. He has seen the disorders of destitution, the vices of misery; but he has seldom found them extinguishing original goodness of heart, or interfering with the noble sentiments that adorn the lowest as well as the highest of mankind. There is nothing new, he tells us, in this observation. At the time of the cholera in France, every body beheld one class eager to adopt the orphan children. What class was that? The Poor.
Whilst in poverty himself, his soul was kept free from envy by noting the unremitting devotedness, the indefatigable sacrifices of hard-working families—a devotedness, he assures us, not even exhausted in the immolation of one life, but often continued from one to another for several generations.
The two families from which he descended were originally peasants. These families being very large, many of his father's and mother's brothers and sisters would not marry, in order that they might the better contribute to the education of some of the boys, whom they sent to college. This was a sacrifice of which he was early made aware, and which he never forgot. His grandfather, a music-master of Laon, came to Paris with his little savings after the Reign of Terror, where his son, the author's father, was employed at the Imprimerie des Assignats. His little wealth was made over to the same son, and all was invested in a printing-office. To facilitate the arrangement, a brother and a sister of the eldest son would not marry, but the latter espoused a sober damsel of Ardennes. M. Michelet, the child of this industrious pair, was born in the year 1798 in the choir of a church of nuns, then occupied by the printing-office. "Occupied, I say, but not profaned; for what is the Press in modern times but the holy ark?"
The printing-office, prosperous at first, fed by the debates of the assemblies and the news of the armies, was overthrown in 1800 by the general suppression of the newspapers. The printer was allowed to publish only an ecclesiastical journal; and even this sanction was withdrawn in favour of a priest whom Napoleon thought safe, but was mistaken. The family of M. Michelet was ruined. They had but one resource; it was to print for their creditors a few works belonging to the printer. They had no longer any journeymen; they did the work themselves. The father, who was occupied with his employment abroad, could render no assistance, but the mother, though sick, turned binder, cut and folded. The child—the future historian—was the compositor; the grandfather, very old and feeble, betook himself to the hard work of the press, and printed with his palsied hands.
The young compositor, at twelve years of age, knew four words of Latin which he had picked up from an old bookseller, who had been a village teacher, and doted on grammar. The scene of the lad's labors—his workshop—was a cellar. For company he had occasionally his grandfather who came to see them, and always, without interruption, an industrious spider, that worked at the compositor's side, and even more assiduously than he. There were severe privations to undergo, but there was also much compensation.
"I had the kindness of my parents, and their faith in my future prospects, a faith which is truly inexplicable, when I reflect how backward I was. Save the binding duties of my work, I enjoyed extreme independence, which I never abused. I was apprenticed, but without being in contact with coarse-minded people, whose brutality, perhaps, would have crushed the precious blossom of liberty within me. In the morning, before work, I went to my old grammarian, who gave me a task of five or six lines. I have retained thus much; that the quantity of work has much less to do with it than is supposed; children can imbibe but a very little every day; like a vase with a narrow neck, pour little or pour much, you will never get a great deal in at a time."
We have said that in his struggles the aspiring boy knew nothing of envy. It is to-day his solemn belief that man would never know envy of himself, he must be taught it. The year 1813 arrived, and the home of the historian, as well as France herself—it was the time of Moscow—looked very cheerless. The penury of the family was extreme. It was proposed to get the compositor a situation in the Imperial printing-office. The parents, more fond than reasonable, refused the offer, and strong in the belief that the child would yet save the household, obtained an entrance for him in the college of Charlemagne. The tale is told. From that hour he rose. His studies ended soon and well. In the year 1821 he procured, by competition, a professorship in a college. In 1827, two works, which appeared at the same time—Vico and Précis d'Histoire Moderne—gained him a professorship in the Ecole Normale.
"I grew up like grass between two paving-stones; but this grass has retained its sap as much as that of the Alps. My very solitude in Paris, my free study, and my free teaching, (ever free and every where the same,) have raised without altering me. They who rise almost always lose by it; because they become changed, they become mongrels, bastards; they lose the originality of their own class without gaining that of another. The difficulty is not to rise, but in rising to remain one's self."
There is also another difficulty; one which, judging from the volume before us, M. Michelet has yet to overcome: we mean the difficulty—after education, and after achieving the heights to which honourable ambition aspires—of forgetting the terrible and bitter punishment of early penury and trouble; of cherishing no longer the anger and hatred that were borne against the world, whilst the struggler looked upon it as a world in arms against him. The author of The People tells us, that in his saddest hours he knew no envy towards mankind; but he acknowledges also, that in his sufferings, he deemed all rich men, all men, bad; that he pined into a misanthropic humour, and, in the most deserted quarters of Paris, sought the most deserted streets. "I conceived an excessive antipathy against the human species." The writer, to use his own expression, "is raised, but not altered." The antipathy, somewhat chastened by prosperity, is not removed. It takes a bodily form in the volume that teaches France to regard the earth as her enemy, and calls upon her to vindicate her pre-eminence and glory in the field of battle and of blood.