The literary world of Paris presents the acme of this combination—squalor and talent. Dramatists, poets, painters, musicians, the smaller fry of the daily press, the heavier authors of yellow-covered romans, all mingled in one inextricable bohemia of distress, of recklessness, of generosity, of self-sacrifice. Good and bad are strangely interwoven; the starving writer stints himself to help the dying artist, or the swaggering playwright repudiates his debts to gamble away in one night the rare remuneration of months of toil; and amid the confusion, the din of this assemblage, amid this fellowship of misery, remains the seemingly eternal truth that the path of scholarship, or even its counterfeit, is not the legitimate path of success.
In France, where the intellect is so fertile that it is almost the only land where literature is a profession, not a pastime, we may turn to one figure more, a sweet and angelic one, very different from the stormy and erratic geniuses among whom we have been wandering—Eugénie de Guérin, the Catholic poetess, the devoted type of sisterly love. She was poor, though not to destitution. The family, once famous among the Languedoc Crusaders, and owning a great feudal estate, had dwindled down to the possession of a patrimony hardly so large and not half so rich as a modern farm. The woman now known throughout Europe and America by her exquisite Journal and Letters—the starting-point of a new class of domestic literature—tells us simply and playfully enough in those writings—which during life she never dreamed of giving to the public—of her humble avocations in her father’s household. Now we see her, having cooked the supper with her sister’s aid while the servants were all gone to an instruction for confirmation, sitting by the huge fire in the kitchen, because it was warm there, and making a hearty meal of coarse soup, boiled potatoes, and a cake baked by herself, “with the dogs and cats to wait upon us,” as she says. She did not like these household cares, however; they were a cross to her, and her good sister “Mimi” took much of this cross off her hands. Another day she has been washing, but she consoles herself with the thought of Homer’s Nausicaa washing her brother’s tunics. Once, when she was lifting a heavy cauldron from the kitchen fire, her father tenderly said he did not like to see her doing such work; but she answered with a smile that S. Bonaventure was found washing the dishes after the refectory meal when the Papal deputation came to offer him the cardinal’s hat! So she taught herself to do “disgusting things without feeling disgust; as, for instance, blackening her hands in the kitchen.” Another time she makes a hasty note of her affection for her brother and her unconquerable longing after solitude, but adds that she has no time for it now, “as there are ducks to be plucked, a pie to be prepared, a little carnival-dinner got up; in a word, because the parish priest was coming, and her help was anxiously waited for in the kitchen”; while another day she is mending old house-linen. On the other hand, she was reading S. Augustine, S. Jerome, S. Teresa, Bossuet, Fénélon, Plutarch, books of theology and philosophy, mysticism and morals, the works of great thinkers; she was writing poems of more exquisite purity and wealth of imagery than the famous young brother whom Sainte-Beuve and George Sand declared one of the foremost poets of the day: she was a child in her simplicity, a saint in her abnegation—a woman in a thousand. We have dwelt with the greater emphasis and satisfaction on this last reference for the reason that the modern world, in its haste to find countenance for its license in thought and morals, has brought into prominence only the less worthy specimens of French genius, to the neglect of the many admirable writers who are now for the first time, becoming familiar to English readers.
This strangely mingled thread of life which we have illustrated in these pages has its pathetic as well as its ludicrous aspect. Men are constantly complaining of the “injustice” of God in making inequalities among them; if they looked a little deeper, they would see that what they call inequalities are compensations. The world has to be ballasted like a ship; the heaviest merchandise is not always the most precious, but it is none the less necessary. It would be preposterous to expect all men to be rich, good, and clever; gifts balance each other in God’s plan, and, since men sigh so for riches, the wise Distributor of earthly prizes has answered many men literally, and given them riches alone, leaving their brains a blank. To discuss this vexed question is not, however, our intention; a few examples, such as we have drawn from real life, speak for themselves, and facts are ever more tolerated than disquisitions. We may learn from those facts a new interest in books; we may remember, when we read a new work, that a human being’s life is sewed in with those pages; that what we carelessly toss aside after a moment’s perusal has cost hours of trouble, of research, probably of privation; that the pathos that draws tears from our eyes is often transcribed and softened down from the actual experience of the writer; while the humor we approve of and the piquancy we admire are rather born of bitter defiance against an adverse fate than grown from the natural soil of a healthy sense of fun. A book is often the hot-pressed fruit of an unhappy life rather than the product of elegant leisure, and one cannot help feeling a tender but far from disparaging pity for the thousands of educated men and women whose very talent, in a sense, compels them, through circumstances of privation, to write in haste and anxiety books that are inadequate representatives of that talent.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
[The S. Augustine Series]: I. On the Trinity; II. Harmony of the Evangelists, and the Sermon on the Mount. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
These two volumes continue the series of patristic translations edited so carefully and published in such splendid style by the firm of Clark, at Edinburgh. The publication and perusal of long and entire works of the fathers, especially S. Augustine, must have a most happy effect in promoting the cause of the Catholic faith. We notice with especial pleasure the volume on the Trinity. This is one of the greatest works of S. Augustine. His argument is wonderfully exhaustive and conclusive, wonderfully sublime and devout, wonderfully rich in the exposition of Holy Scripture. It is also very plain and intelligible to a patient and attentive reader when the peculiar difficulties of the Latin style have been overcome. In this translation, the structure and meaning of the sentences and phrases are made very plain, and one reads with a pleasure and facility much enhanced by the clearness and beauty of the page. We recommend this translation to all who wish for a very valuable help to the rendering of S. Augustine in the original, as well as to those who desire to become acquainted with his doctrine, and can only do so through the medium of their own language.
[A Life of S. Walburge]; with the Itinerary of S. Willibald. By the Rev. Thomas Meyrick, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. 1873. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
All who love the mediæval saints, and particularly those of once Catholic England, will find a delicious treat in this simple story. Besides the life and death of S. Walburge, an account is given of