accomplished; and Maurice de Guérin is only remembered by the single fragment which George Sand edited, the "Centaur. Mdlle. de Guérin lived on through ten years of monotonous suffering, only consoled by the devoted friendship of her own and her brother's friends. For one of these last the latter part of her Journal was kept; to another the few letters that have been printed were addressed. It is curious to find the same gentleman the correspondent of George Sand and of Mdlle. de Guérin. Probably, to quote an expression of her own, she had placed the cross between her friend and herself to sustain both. At last, in 1848, the end arrived. "I believe," says her sister, "she saw the approach of death, but she never spoke of it; she would have feared to pain us." One of her last directions was, that her papers should be burned. The private journals and letters from which our extracts have been made were saved from destruction, probably, because they were not in the hands of the family. They have been printed for circulation among a few friends. As time removes the reasons for privacy, it is to be hoped that they will be given to the world. Generally, there is a certain indecorum in publishing private experiences or feelings of any kind. But the life of a woman like Mdlle. de Guérin is at once so transparent and so deep, that it may bear any scrutiny, and will never be pene trated except by the subtle insight of sympathy. Memoirs of this kind are so scarce that, to the few who value them at all, they are inestimable. But on other and higher grounds their publication is desirable. The large public of honest men and pure women in France are little aware how much their national character is depreciated by the nameless baseness and badness of their novel-literature. It is no inveterate prejudice that leads Englishmen to ascribe the morals of stock-jobbers and of lorettes to a great people whom we sincerely wish to respect; most of us are constrained to take our information secondhand, and to trust to the pictures of French society which native novelists draw; and France suffers for the faults of a class who base their ideal of life on the breach of every commandment except the fifth; just as English society on the Continent is too often judged from the noisy and underbred among our countrymen. Nothing is more likely to remove such misconceptions than the knowledge of such a family interior as the memoirs of Mdlle. de Guérin show us, in which delicacy, purity, and the practice of little household charities seem as native to the daily life as they could be in the most blameless English home. With a little change of names and local colouring, the Journal might have been kept, and the life lived, by hundreds of English ladies. It is wonderful to see how slightly even the chief difference, that of faith, affects the writer's character. Probably many English Protestants will be startled to hear of a Catholic lady who was eminently devout, and who yet felt no attractions to conventual life, and disliked confessing to a priest who was not a friend. Only perhaps in one point is there a marked difference. A sensible English woman would regard cheerfulness as a duty in itself, and would shrink from expressing any disgust with life. The ascetic element in Catholicism inspires a different tone; and Mdlle. de Guérin never hesitates to confess to herself that life has no attractions, and that she will be glad to lay it down. "At the bottom of all we find emptiness and nothing," the phrase she quotes from Bossuet, is the key-note to her confessions. We proceed to quote at some length one or two passages from the Journal. The first that occurs opens cheerfully; it was written before her great loss. "En lisant un livre de géologie, j'ai rencontré un éléphant fossile découvert dans la Laponie, et une pirogue déterrée dans l'Ile des Cygnes en creusant les fondations du Pont des Invalides. Me voilà sur l'éléphant, me voilà dans la pirogue faisant le tour des mers du Nord et de l'Ile des Cygnes. Voyant ces lieux du temps de ces choses: la Laponie chaude, verdoyante et peuplée, non de nains, mais d'hommes beaux et grands, de femmes s'en allant en promenade sur un éléphant dans ces forêts, sous ces monts pétrifiés aujourd'hui, et l'Ile des Cygnes, blanche de fleurs et de leur duvet. Oh, que je la trouve belle! Et ses habitants qui sont-ils, que font-ils dans ce coin du globe? Descendants comme nous de l'exile d'Eden, connaissent-ils sa naissance, sa vie, sa chute, sa lamentable et merveilleuse histoire; cette Eve pour laquelle il a perdu le ciel, tant de malheur et de bonheur ensemble, tant d'espérances dans la foi, tant de larmes sur leurs enfants, tant et tant de choses que nous savons, que savait peut-être avant nous ce peuple, dont il ne reste qu'une planche? Naufrages de l'humanité que Dieu seul connaît dont il a laché dans les profondeurs de la terre, comme pour les dérober à notre curiosité. S'il en laisse voir quelque chose, c'est pour nous apprendre que ce globe est un abîme de malheurs, que ce qu'on gagne à remuer ses entrailles, c'est de découvrir des inscriptions funéraires, des cimetières. La mort est au fond de tout, et on creuse toujours comme qui cherche l'immortalité." The transition from a string of playful fancies to religion in its most sombre sentiments is highly characteristic of the writer. A strong feeling of any kind, even despair, seems to be a relief from the ennui of ordinary life. We in England know something of the craving for occupation in any shape that possesses unmarried women of strong character; but among us it finds vent in a hundred useful or harmless forms,-in district societies, in the study of new sciences, or in writing religious novels. There is comparatively little of this in France. Sisterhoods of Martha and Mary, and such-like kindred forms of ladies' com mittees, no doubt exist; but they find the poor more jealous of interference than our own are, and the ground is already occupied by the priests, and by those regular fraternities. The prejudice against educated women, which is still far from extinct in England, is infinitely stronger in France, except in a few of the highest circles of the capital. This is no doubt chiefly the result of habit; the ideal of woman has been formed from those who are trained in convents and under the priests; and the worthy directresses of schools shrink very naturally from any approach to la femme émancipée, and view secular studies beyond the common bent with extreme suspicion. It is something of the same feeling which regards the cultivation of the physique as indelicate, and shrinks from "the rude unfeeling health" which English ladies derive from riding and long country walks. The native quickness and unrivalled conversational talent of French women enables them to talk, and even to think, well on less knowledge than would sustain any other race. If they marry early, they scarcely feel the want of high intellectual training; or if they come in contact with superior men, they easily seize the ideas that circulate around them. But the want of thought tells none the less, and avenges itself naturally; it leads to a brilliant hollowness in the intercourse of the salons, where trifles, scandals, and little narrow views of faith or politics take the place of serious ideas: it is the source of vice, or at least of indiscretion, among the more impulsive and worse trained, who take refuge from vacuity in passion; and in nobler natures, like that of Mdlle. de Guérin, it wears away life itself, by the ceaseless tension of the soul. Her position did not often bring her into mixed society. When she saw the world in her visits to Paris, she was able to remain outside it, enjoying it but selfsphered. The relief from solitude and the glitter of new ideas did not attract her so much as the insincerity disgusted her. The judgment she passes is the more remarkable in one who, we are told, made a great success by her character and originality, in spite of her provincial training. "Tant d'habileté, de finesse, de chatterie, de souplesse ne s'obtiennent pas sans préjudice, sans leur sacrifier point de grâces. Et néanmoins je les aime, j'aime tout ce qui est élégance, bon goût, belles et nobles manières. Je m'enchante aux conversations distinguées et sérieuses des hommes, comme aux causeries perles fines des femmes, à ce jeu si joli, si délicat de leurs lèvres dont je n'avais pas idée. C'est charmant, oui, c'est charmant en vérité (chanson), pour qui se prend aux apparences, mais je ne m'en contente pas. Le moyen de s'en contenter, quand on tient à la valeur morale des choses? Ceci dit dans le sens de faire vie dans le monde, d'en tirer du bonheur, d'y fonder des espérances sérieuses, d'y croire à quelque chose. Mmes. de * * sont venues, je les ai crues longtemps amies, à entendre leurs paroles expansives, leur mutuel témoignage d'interêt, et ce délicieux ma chère de Paris: oui, c'est à les croire amies, et c'est vrai tant qu'elles sont en présence, mais au départ on dirait que chacune a laissé sa caricature à l'autre. Plaisantes liaisons! mais il en existe d'autres heureusement pour moi." How exalted her notion of friendship was, we learn from another passage, which is in itself sufficiently remarkable. It will serve to complete the hasty sketch, to which our space limits us, of a life that deserves to be studied in its entirety. "J'ai toujours cherché une amitié forte et telle que la mort seule la pût renverser, bonheur et malheur que j'ai en, hélas! dans Maurice. Nulle femme n'a pu ni ne le pourra remplacer; nulle même la plus distinguée n'a pu m'offrir cette liaison d'intelligence et de goûts, cette relation large, unie et de tenue. Rien de fixe, de durée, de vital dans les sentiments des femmes; leurs attachements entr'elles ne sont que de jolis nœuds de rubans. Je les remarque ces légères tendresses dans toutes les amies. Ne pouvons-nous donc pas nous aimer autrement? Je ne sais ni n'en connais d'exemple au présent, pas même dans l'histoire. Oreste et Pylade n'ont pas de sceurs. Cela m'impatiente quand j'y pense, et que vous autres ayez au cœur une chose qui nous y manque. En revanche, nous avons le dévouement." ART. VII.—OLD CREEDS AND NEW BELIEFS. Essays and Reviews. London: J. W. Parker & Son, 1860. Gespräche von Ulrich von Hutten übersetzt und erläutert von David Die Tübinger Schule und ihre Stellung zur Gegenwart. Von Dr. F. The Faith of the Liturgy and the Doctrine of the Thirty-nine ON all sides, it must be confessed, at home and abroad, the Γ The two first publications that we have placed at the head of this article exhibit the Dissenters and the Establishment of our own country in a strange and anomalous position towards each other. With Nonconformity, in all its old historical forms, we had been accustomed to associate the traditions of a long and noble struggle for mental freedom and religious equality. Trusting to its hereditary professions, we had always supposed that it was prepared to resist to the death every invasion of the sanctuary of conscience. We have naturally looked to it for hearty sympathy in all earnest and religious efforts to find out the truth, to diffuse knowledge, and to accelerate the moral and spiritual progress of the human race. On the other hand, we had been taught to regard the Establishment and her two associated Universities, especially the elder sister of Oxford, as the stronghold of a dogged and unimpressible conservatism, rich indeed in learning, and mighty in disciplined intellect, but guarding its accumulated treasures with griffin-like jealousy in unsunned and useless heaps, instead of bringing them forth to the light of day, and freely circulating them as a fructifying capital in unrestricted commerce with mankind. At the close of the first decennium of the second half of the nineteenth century, what do we actually behold? What is the startling contrast that presents itself? A man of great acquirements and unimpeachable character, whose services to biblical literature have won for him honourable notice from distinguished scholars in his own country and on the Continent,* is ejected from his professorship in one of the principal colleges of a Nonconformist body which traces its descent from the earliest assertors of religious liberty in England, and is proud of the names of a Milton and a Vane, a Watts and a Doddridge, not for any abandonment of doctrines regarded by the mass of Protestants as essentially evangelical, but for the simple adoption of certain principles of critical and historical investigation, which ignorant men, wholly unqualified to judge, have been pleased to charge with dangerous consequences, though they are now all but universally accepted by men of competent learning throughout Europe. A pupil of Dr. Davidson's, not prepared to embrace all his views, but loving justice and fair play, appealed to the public on behalf of an honoured teacher, in whose person he felt-and justly—that the rights of the individual conscience, and the interests of free Christian learning, had been wantonly assailed. Singularly Among his countrymen we may mention Dr. Cureton; among the Germans, Rödiger of Halle, Bleek of Bonn, and Lücke of Göttingen-the two last now removed from the scene of their earthly labours. Lücke recommended the translation of Dr. Davidson's Introduction to the New Testament into German (Einleit. in die Offenbar. des Johannes, § 85, p. 1067 note). This is a distinction not often conferred on an Englishman at the present day by the theologians of Germany. |