Till great Time, when the cycles have run their courses on high.
Takes the inbred pollution, and leaves to us only the bright

Sense of heaven's own ether, and fire from the springs of the sky.
When for a thousand years they have rolled their wheels through
the night,

God to the Lethe river recalls this myriad train.
That with remembrance lost once more they may visit the light,

And, at the last, have desire for a life in the body again.*



[The future heroes of Rome pass by: among the last, the Marcelli. The
death of the young Marcellus, nephew and heir of Augustus, had recently oc-
curred when this book was read by Virgil at court. The bereft mother was
said to have fainted at this passage.]

<* Lo where decked in a conqueror's spoils Marcellus, my son.
Strides from the war! How he towers o'er all of the warrior train!



I543S



VIRGIL



"When Rome reels with the shock of the wild invaders' alarm.
He shall sustain her state. From his war-steed's saddle his arm
Carthage and rebel Gaul shall destroy, and the arms of the slain
Victor a third time hang in his father Quirinus's fane."

Then .^neas, — for near him a youth seemed ever to pace,
Fair, of an aspect princely, with armor of glittering grace,
Yet was his forehead joyless, his eye cast down as in grief, —
<<Who can it be, my father, that walks at the side of the chief?

Is it his son, or perchance some child of his glorious race
Born from remote generations? And hark, how ringing a cheer
Breaks from his comrades round! What a noble presence is here!

Though dark night with her shadow of woe floats over his face!**

Answer again Anchises began with a gathering tear: —
<*Ask me not, O my son, of thy children's infinite pain!
Fate one glimpse of the boy to the world will grant, and again
Take him from life. Too puissant methinks to immortals on high
Rome's great children had seemed, if a gift like this from the sky
Longer had been vouchsafed! What wailing of warriors bold
Shall from the funeral plain to the War-god's city be rolled!
What sad pomp thine eyes will discern, what pageant of woe,
When by his new-made tomb thy waters, Tiber, shall flow!
Never again such hopes shall a youth of thy lineage, Troy,
Rouse in his great forefathers of Latium! Never a boy
Nobler pride shall inspire in the ancient Romulus-land!
Ah, for his filial love! for his old-world faith! for his hand
Matchless in battle! Unharmed what foemen had offered to stand
Forth in his path, when charging on foot for the enemy's ranks.
Or when plunging the spur in his foam-flecked courser's flanks!
Child of a nation's sorrow! if thou canst baffle the Fates'
Bitter decrees, and break for a while their barrier gates,
Thine to become Marcellus! I pray thee, bring me anon
Handfuls of lilies, that I bright flowers may strew on my son,
Heap on the shade of the boy unborn these gifts at the least,
Doing the dead, though vainly, the last sad service.**

Translation of Sir Charles Bowen.



15439



MELCHIOR DE VOGUE

(1 848-)

BY GRACE KING



yiyrTti<s^.Ci




!he Vicotnte Eugene Melchior de Vogiie, born at Nice, February
25th, 1848, is the leader, to characterize him in the most
summary way, in the reactionary movement which has been
the historic event of French literature during the last quarter of the
century. He was the- precursor of the movement, the evangelist of
it, before it found official expression in literature; when, in the day
of national misfortune and national need, the eyes of serious French-
men were opened to the slough of sensuality, which, draining through
their literature and aft into their life and manners, had diseased
their morality and enervated their will. Various names, when the
reaction first stirred thought, were essayed to define or describe the
movement, — such as Neo-Christian, and Spiritualization of Thought;
it has been called Fiesolist, and likened to the Pre-Raphaelite move-
ment in England: but as time progresses, any sectarian class or
period appellation seems to be too narrow for what is essentially a
national evolution, a patriotic as well as a literary renaissance. More
than any other man in French literature, M. de Vogiie has been the
medium to express the broad nationality and Catholicity of the new
birth; and it would be hardly too much praise to say that in the
clear-sighted conservation of religion and politics, in his life and
works, he typified it.

On the first of January, 1890, in an open New-Year's letter << To
Those who are Twenty Years Old,^^ — that is, to those who were born
during the Franco-Prussian war, — he gives the keynote of his life
and works: "All who are capable of it owe to our country mental,
more imperiously even than military, service.'* Twenty years before,
he, a young soldier, in that crucial period just past his majority, was
enduring the moral and physical suffering of defeat, the humiliation
of prospective national and political annihilation. But he relates how
the light shone before him on his road to Damascus: —

«It is now nearly twenty years ago that the truth made itself known in
a flood to the one who writes these lines, as to many others, — to all those
who were being carried along the road to Germany on the night of the first
and second of September, 1870. The miserable procession was descending
the slopes that lay between Bazeilles and Douzy. Below us the bivouac fires
of the conquerors starred the valley of the Meuse. From the field of blood
where were camped the hundred thousand men whom we thought sleeping,



JC.AAO MELCHIOR DE VOGUE

worn out with their victory, there arose upon the air one strong, one single
voice from the hundred thousand breasts. They sang the hymn of Luther.
The solemn prayer spread over the whole horizon, it filled the heavens,
as far as there were fires — Germans. Far along in the night we heard it:
it was so grand, so majestic, that not one of us could help thrilHng writh awe;
even those, who, crushed by suffering and fatigue, were being driven out of
what had been France,— even they forgot their grief for a moment in the
unwelcome emotion. More than one of us, young as we were, and unripened
by reflection, saw clearly in that moment what power it was that had van-
quished us : it w^as not the girdle of steel cannon, nor the weight of regiments ;
it was the one superior soul, made up of all those different souls, steeped in
one Divine national faith, firmly convinced that behind their cannon, God was
marching with them at the side of their old King.»

« Methods of instruction and military training,'^ he exclaims, «Krupp can-
non and Mauser guns — nothing but accidents, all those things! Accidental
also the sagacity of a Moltke, and of his lieutenants. What made these in-
struments terrible ? The serious submissive soul of the people who used them ! »

From military service and imprisonment, Vogiie passed into what
was intended as his career, — diplomacy; and was made attache to the
French embassy at Constantinople. Traveling through the East —
Palestine, Syria, Egypt — among the aged monmnents of human effort,
the echoes of a vanished civilization, truth again came to him in a
flood of new ideas : ** History appeared to him not as a corpse to be
dissected, a tomb of the Past to be explored, but as humanity itself, —
alive, present, vital; a drama to be seen with one's own eyes, felt in
one's own veins; ... a thing of himself, of his brothers, of his
country.*^ ^< Picturesqueness of aspect, memories recalled of distant
ages, visions, intuitions, dreams, — these are the things of greatest
interest to me,^> he says frankly; in other words, the predominance of
idea over fact, of the soul of the race over the soul of the individual.
His letters written in the first glow of these illuminations from the
East, and published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, made Vogtie's
name known in the literary world of the day. From Constantinople
he was transferred to St. Petersburg, where he remained several
years; years of fruitful literary activity, his labors — Russian stories,
and studies of Russian life — enriching not merely the thought and lit-
erature of his own country, but of Europe and America. The door of
Russian literature, opened by Merimee, had swung to again. Vogiie
has propped it open; and the great stream of what he calls "the
new realism pleading the cause of humanity, >^ that poured through
its pages upon the arid mockery and materialism of French letters,
was a divine irrigation upon desiccated seed. In the light of the har-
vest that arose therefrom in the literature of the world, it would seem
impossible to do full justice to the importance of this one benefit
conferred by Vogiie upon his fellow-men, without accepting his own
belief that literature is a mission, not a profession.



MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 15441

The Exhibition of 1889 has been generally adopted as a con-
venient date for the manifestation of the literary reaction in France,
and Vogiie's eloquent article upon it as its manifesto. For him the
Exhibition was before all a problem of moral significance, an awak-
enment of energies in a people restored to their consciousness of
self. "Let us hope,** he concludes, "that science will one day reveal
the Central Motor, the motor whence are derived the sometimes
conflicting applications of power. We shall then learn that there is
not found the transmission of the sovereign energy, — that there the
principle itself stands condemned. The laws of the outward, universe
are but the reflex of the moral world within; and the universal force
once adequately distributed in its proper channel will inspire the
human heart for all the purposes of human life. In this new order
of things, Force must regain its ancient name; with us, as with the
Romans, it must be called Virtue. We may find at last, that in truth
all metamorphoses of Force are but the transmutations of Virtue.**

The following extract from an article on the Neo-Christian move-
ment in France, written by M. de Vogiie for Harper's Magazine, is
the most authentic word upon it and his connection with it: —

"Whatever may be the eiTective result of the Neo-Christian crises, they
will require a long time to come to a head; and when the religious idea has
conquered the cultivated classes, it will have to reconquer by a slow process
of infiltration the people at large, whom M. Taine has shown as returning to
paganism. Popular beliefs have persisted obstinately beneath the unbelief
of higher spheres, and yielded only gradually to the preaching of incredulity.
They will be born again with the same slowness, as a consequence of preach-
ing in the opposite sense. . . . We are in the presence of a nebula which
is forming and wandering in the celestial space. The Creator always knows
the hour and the place which he has marked for the condensation of this
nebula into the solidity and brightness of an organized world. However
imperfect and vague the nebula may be, men of good will prefer it to the
gloom from which we are issuing. They are of opinion that the search after
the ideal is a great sign of the raising up of France, where everything was
on the point of sinking into gross realism, — both characters and minds, both
public morality and intellectual productions. Those who have been the arti-
sans of the present movement have the right to think that they have not
lost their day's work; and since the writer of these pages has been often
mocked for the part he has taken in the movement, may he be here allowed
to claim openly his share in it.>*
XXVI — 966




^ CV




1^442 MELCHIOR DE VOGUfi



DEATH OF WILLIAM I. OF GERMANY

WILLIAM I. lies beneath the dome in the centre of the cold
bare edifice in which the Lutherans of Prussia pray. In
the empty temple there is only death and God — unless
those four statues with fixed gaze, as rigid beneath their armor,
as immovable as he over whom they watch, be men. Let us
suppose — the impossible — a stranger ignorant of the whole his-
tory of our times; he visits this monument, raises the military
cloak, and asks who is this officer who sleeps here in the uniform
of the First Regiment of the Grenadier Guards. Let us suppose
— again the impossible — that one of these fixities should open
his mouth in reply, and simply repeat what his schoolmaster
had taught him of the Emperor's life. The ignorant visitor would
smile at these fantastic words: he would think the sergeant was
reciting some marvelous fable of old Germany. For the real of
to-day will become the marvelous of to-morrow; future ages will
be found admiring but incredulous, as we now are for that which
was the real in the olden times: for we do not know how to
look at the dream moment in which fate makes us live; habit
and the use of each day blind our moral sight.

That which the soldier would have said to the stranger has
been repeated to satiety for a week past. The history of Will-
iam L has been given in summary in all the papers, given in de-
tail in books which are in everybody's hands. There is nothing
for us to add; and if there were, should we have the power to
do it ? To dwell upon certain pages, the most necessary, the hand
would tremble and the eye no longer see with clearness. A few
words will suffice to recall the events of that long Hfe, before we
essay to judge it. Born in the decline of the other century, —
days already so far distant from us that they are already the days
of our ancestors, — a little cadet in a little State, this child of
feeble health grew up on the steps of a crumbling throne. His
eyes opened to see increasing upon the country and upon the
world the oppressive shadow of Napoleon; they learned to weep
over his country cut into pieces, over the agony of a mother a
fugitive and mendicant in her own domains; his cradle is tossed
about among the baggage of defeated armies: upon leaving this
cradle he is dressed in the clothes of a soldier, to replace those
whom the incessant war around him has mowed down; hussar,



MELCHIOR DE VOGUfi 15443

Uhlan, cornet, his little uniforms change as do the swaddling-
clothes of other children; as soon as he can hold a weapon, at
fifteen years of age, he is thrown into the conflict: and this is
at the hour of fortune's turn against us; the reflux of Europe
throws him upon France with the pack of kings and princes
called together for the quarry: he fights — this living one of a
week ago — amid those phantoms vanished into the depths of
history; at the side of Bliicher, Schwartzenberg, Barclay; against
Oudinot and Victor: he enters Paris, and he probably dreams
one of those foolish dreams of first youth, as did every officer
of Napoleon's time; he sees himself — the Prussian captain, sud-
denly promoted generalissimo — taking as his share the glorious
city, deciding upon the fate of the captive Emperor: and no
doubt he laughs over his dream on waking; for the world is
tired of war, — universal peace condemns the soldier to repose.
William re-enters obscurity for a long time; his life disappears
like those long rivers whose course we ignore between their
source and their mouth, where they change name: he reappears
a half-century later; at the moment where all generally ends
with old men, he takes up the crown from the altar of Konigs-
berg, and finding it too narrow for his head, he reforges it by
sword-strokes over the fire of battles for seven prodigious years;
he extends his kingdom as quickly and as far as the tenfold
increased reach of his shells; he makes of his puny hereditary
guard-house the vastest barracks that exist on the globe. After
trying his strength on a defenseless neighbor, he fells with one
hand the Holy Roman Empire, with the other the French power.
He no longer counts his victories, — armies taken in nets, kings
swept away before him: a second Napoleon, prisoner at the door
of his tent, recalls to him the fall of the first which happened
under his eye; and the old dream of the young captain is sur-
passed, when, encamped before a Paris surrounded by his troops
and bombarded by his cannon, in the palace of Louis XIV., where
his camp bed is placed, the princes of Germany bring the impe-
rial crown to the new Caesar. It would seem that this septuage-
narian needs only to end in this apotheosis. But long days of
glory and happiness are still reserved for him; while below him
all other thrones change occupants, he remains incontestably the
chief and patriarch of all kings, dictating to them his wishes,
calling them by a nod to his court. His gorged eagle soars
tranquilly above all reach; God protects him, he is invulnerable;



12^4 MELCHIOR DE VOGU6

twice assassins strike and twice he is healed, at an age when a
mere nothing kills. People grow accustomed to think him im-
mortal, like his predecessor Barbarossa. Death grows impatient
and prowls timidly about his chamber, but dares not strike; each
morning is seen again the familiar head straight and smiling at
the historic window, where he is interrogated to know whether
nations will be permitted to live that day in peace. He is said
to be ill: the following morning he holds a review; convokes a
congress; goes to his frontiers to preside at an interview of
sovereigns: he is said to be dead, and the world, told of his end,
refuses to believe it. It is hardly longer ago than yesterday that
the people were convinced that the Emperor of Germany, van-
quished at last, slowly overcome by the eternal sleep, had finally
submitted to the common law and consented to die.

At this hour the judgments of men are indifferent to him.
Their praise is worth just so much as those brilliant orders
pinned to the tunic of death; just so much as the wax, the flow-
ers, that die on his coffin. The Emperor is before his God, He
meets accusing witnesses, many and redoubtable. It would be
presumption to seek to divine the sentence of the Sole Judge,
who alone has the right to pronounce it. Let us hope for him
who sued for grace yesterday, as well as for all of us, that man
is judged by the God in whom he believed — which does not
mean that there are many. There is but one: but being infi-
nite intelligence, he manifests himself under different aspects as
diverse as our needs; he measures himself to the extent of our
vision; being infinite justice and mercy, he holds a soul to ac-
count only for the manifestation made. . .

The Emperor has gone forth through the Brandenburg
gate; kings and princes have abandoned him, the people have
dispersed, his escort has broken ranks. The Emperor continues
alone through the Alley of Victory. He passes along the foot
of a tower. We know of what it is made, — this fateful tower of
bronze; the cannon still show their mute mouths jutting forth
over the periphery in symmetric crowns; their souls are prisoners
in the melted mass. They have waited long, these servitors
of death, for William; they knew that death loved to change his
trophies: they watch him as he passes. The horses hurry their
steps toward Charlottenburg. Do they fear that in the solitary
alleys of the forest, in the mournful fog of the winter's day,
another cortege will form to replace the princely escort which no



MELCHIOR DE VOGUE ^5445

longer follows the car ? A cortege of phantoms waits its chance
in the shadow of the heavy pyramid from which it has come
forth. Innumerable spectres: young men mutilated, mothers in
mourning, every form of suffering and misery; and princes too,
but despoiled, without diadems, led by an old blind king, who
has gathered them up on all the roads of exile to come, the last
to testify — the last of all, on the edge of the imperial tomb —
to the other side of this glorious history. But why should we
call up imaginar}^ phantoms ? There was one only too real that
awaited the Emperor on the threshold of the mausoleum of Char-
lottenburg: destiny never devised a meeting more tragic. For
one instant he appeared behind the window-panes of the pal-
ace: for the first and last time he saluted from afar the mortal
body of his father; his eyes followed it as it went to the bed
of rest of the Hohenzollerns. Then all vanished, — the fugitive
apparition which had reaped empire as it passed, and the dead
who slipped from the hands of his guards into the deep vault.
One last salvo from all the cannon around, dogs barking after
their masters, and the noise of his little day is finished.

Translated for *A Library of the World's Best Literature, > by Grace King.



REALISTIC LITERATURE AND THE RUSSIAN NOVEL

CLASSICAL literature considered man on the summits of human-
ity, in the great transports of passion; as the protagonist
in some very noble and very simple drama, in which the
actors divided among themselves certain roles of virtue and
wickedness happiness and suffering, — conformable to ideal and
absolute conceptions about a superior life, in which the soul of
man worked always to one end. In short, the classical man
was the one hero whom all primitive literatures considered alone
worthy of their attention. The action of this hero corresponded
to a group of ideas, — religious, monarchical, social, and moral, —
that furnished the foundation upon which the human family has
rested since its earliest attempts at organization. In magnifying
his hero for good or for evil, the classical poet was proposing a
model of what should or should not be, rather than an example of
what really existed. For a century, other views have insensibly
come to prevail: they have resulted in an art of observation more



J 5 446 MELCHIOR DE VOGM

than of imagination, — an art which is supposed to represent hfe
as it is, in its entirety and in its complexity, and with the least
possible prejudice on the part of the artist. It takes man in the
ordinary conditions of life, characters from every-day routine,
small and changeable. Jealous of the rigorous logic of scientific
processes, the artists propose to inform us by a perpetual analy-
sis of sentiments and acts, much more than to move us by the
intrigue and spectacle of passions. Classical art imitated a being
who governs, punishes, rewards, chooses his favorites from a select
aristocracy, and imposes upon them his elegant conventions of
morality and language. The new art seeks to imitate nature in
its unconscious ableness, its moral indifferences, its absence of
choice; the triumph of the general over the individual, of the
crowd over the hero, of the relative over the absolute. It has
been called realistic, naturalistic; but would not democratic suffice
to define it ?

No : a view which stopped at this apparent literary root would
be too short-sighted. The change in political order (political
change) is only an episode in the universal and prodigious change
that is being accomplished in the whole world about us. Observe
for a century the work of the human mind in all its applications:
one would say that a legion of workmen had been busy in turn-
ing over, to replace upon its base, some enormous pyramid which
was- leaning upon its apex. Man has begun again from the bot-
tom to explain the universe; and he perceives that the existence
of this universe, its greatness and its ills, proceed from an inces-
sant labor of the infinitely small. While institutions were return-
ing the government of the States to the multitude, science was
referring the government of the world to atoms. Everywhere
in the analysis of physical and moral phenomena, ancient causes
have been decomposed, or so to speak crumbled away: for the
simple sudden agents proceeding with great blows of power,
which once explained for us the revolutions of the globe, of his-
tory, of the soul, has been substituted the continual evolution of
infinitesimal and obscure life. ... Is it necessary to insist
upon the application of these tendencies to practical life ? Level-
ing of the classes, division of fortunes, universal suffrage, liber-
ties and servitudes on an equal footing before the judge, in the
barracks, at the school, — all the consequences of the principle are
summed up in this word Democracy, which is the watchword of
the times. . . . Literature, that written confession of society,



MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 15447

could not remain a stranger to the general change of direction ;
instinctively at first, then consciously, doctrinally, she adapted
her materials and her ideas to the new spirit. Her first essays
at reformation were uncertain and awkward: romanticism (we
must now acknowledge it) was a bastard production; it breathed
revolt. In reaction from the classical hero, it sought its sub-