onal 
 ity
 
 f
 
 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION
 
 SIX MASTERS 
 IN DISILLUSION 
 
 BY 
 
 ALGAR THOROLD 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 
 
 29 WEST 23RD STREET 
 1909
 

 
 ERRATA 
 
 P. 84, line 4. For ' absent from the pages ' read ' absent from these 
 pages.' 
 
 P. 87, line 14. For 'hence the success of the uneducated' read 
 ' hence her success with the uneducated.' 
 
 P. 91, line 8. For 'qu'il semble une parole, issue de 1'accouplement 
 de Lisa' read 'qu'il semble, ma parole, issu de 1'accouplement 
 de Lisa.' 
 
 P. 116, line 8. For 'The generalisations by means of which we 
 organise what we call "external,"' read 'The generalisations 
 by means of which we organise what we call "external reality."'
 
 The first six Essays in this volume 
 have already appeared, much in their 
 present form, in the Edinburgh^ In- 
 dependent, and Albany Reviews, The 
 Author's thanks are due to Messrs. 
 Longmans, and to the Progressive 
 Press, Ltd., for permission to reprint 
 them. The Epilogue appears here 
 for the first time.
 
 TO THE READER 
 
 IN order that the reader may be as little disap- 
 pointed as possible with these studies, I must 
 explain that they are not concerned with strictly 
 contemporary disillusion. The period which they 
 are intended, in a very partial and tentative way, to 
 illustrate is behind us, and its forces are in great 
 measure already spent. Contemporary disillusion, 
 of which, among the writers here noticed, Anatole 
 France alone could fairly be considered an example, 
 is a different matter. Our fathers were rationalists, 
 and were naive enough to think that Theology 
 stood or fell by its claims to rationality. They 
 thought that the cosmology and psychology of 
 Christianity, the propositions which it enunciated 
 about the nature of man and the world he finds 
 himself in, were intended to be taken as facts. 
 As facts they tested them, with the result that the 
 account of the world and man contained in the 
 
 ix
 
 x SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Sacred Books of Christianity and the authoritative 
 decrees of the Church, have ceased to form part of 
 the mental culture of the West- European races. 
 For although the Catholic Church still lives and 
 he must know little of humanity who doubts that it 
 will go on living ecclesiastical cosmology, history 
 and psychology are things of the past as irrelevant 
 to contemporary knowledge as the Hindu Pan- 
 theon or Muslim Demonology. The work of the 
 rationalist emancipators in this respect has been 
 done, and done so thoroughly that it forms part of 
 the unquestioned mental heritage that everybody 
 takes for granted. Nevertheless we, or at least 
 those of us who are disillusioned to-day, are not 
 rationalists. We have pushed analysis further 
 than our fathers did, nay, in our turn, we have 
 laid sacrilegious hands on their standard of truth. 
 It has fared no better at our hands than that of 
 their fathers did at theirs. This is, however, not 
 the place to discuss contemporary disillusion. 
 
 It is in the disillusionment consequent on this 
 change of attitude towards Christianity in which 
 the writers studied here agree. In nearly every- 
 thing else they differ. Fontenelle, a sort of smil- 
 ing malicious Precursor of the Evangel of the last
 
 TO THE READER xi 
 
 two centuries, seems to attain prophetically the 
 scepticism of a later period. He was a very 
 difficult person to pay with words. Merimee, 
 equally detached from the optimism of the 
 eighteenth century, presents rather the elegant 
 cynicism of the man of the world who will not 
 admit that he is wounded to the heart. The 
 masterly studies of ecclesiastical psychology which 
 we owe to Ferdinand Fabre indicate one aspect of 
 the line of defence adopted by the clergy against 
 the changed world in which they find themselves. 
 That attitude was an important factor in the 
 politics of every country in Europe where the 
 Church had power during the nineteenth century, 
 and contributed most effectively to the detachment 
 of the educated classes from Christianity. Maeter- 
 linck, on the other hand, while emphatically post- 
 Christian, and therefore deriving from the specific 
 disillusionment of the eighteenth century, retains 
 much of the optimism of the Fathers of the 
 Encyclopaedia. Indeed his optimism is but faintly 
 tempered by the delays and incertitudes of science, 
 not at all by philosophical analysis, while his 
 appreciation of the enormous difficulties in the 
 way of any serious human advance, his view of
 
 xii SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 the actual situation, seem at times disconcertingly 
 vague. But then he has the divine gift of mysti- 
 cism, a very special mysticism of his own, if you 
 will, inspired, in so far as it is philosophical, by 
 Hartmann's ' Unconscious,' made effective through 
 the essential poetry of his own nature. 
 
 Anatole France, as I have said, represents a riper 
 mood of scepticism, the mood of Renan in his last 
 years. The vision of the age of reason which 
 inspires the labours of the Encyclopaedists no 
 longer inspires him. In him disillusion may be 
 said to reach its term. Yet, in many ways, he is 
 the most dix-huitieme of any writer of the present 
 time. The optimism, which, as far as rational 
 tests go, is in no better position than theology, 
 has nevertheless left in his mind a sweet and 
 mellow compassion for humanity, an inextinguish- 
 able love of man, which gives an irresistible 
 attractiveness to his work at its best, and then his 
 exquisite manner, the naive charm with which 
 he presents his purely intellectual perversity recalls 
 so delightfully the mignardise of the age of salons. 
 
 Among these writers perhaps the most bitter 
 and poignant master in disillusion is Huysmans. 
 Disillusion does not remain a purely intellectual
 
 TO THE READER xiii 
 
 phase, and no one has expressed more vividly than 
 he, its sentimental and sensuous reactions. The 
 course which his personal disillusion among other 
 motives led him to adopt, while itself obviously 
 outside legitimate criticism, serves nevertheless as 
 the measure of the depth to which that disillusion 
 went.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TO THE READER, ... v 
 
 FONTENELLE, . . i 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE, 26 
 
 FERDINAND FABRE, 56 
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS, .... 80 
 
 MAETERLINCK, . . . . . .96 
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE, . . . .119 
 
 EPILOGUE, . 147
 
 FONTENELLE 
 
 THE extraordinary clear-headedness of the French, ' 
 their readiness to pursue an idea to its logical term 
 and its complete literary and social expression, gives 
 to their fortunes at any given moment, an air of 
 finality which seems at first sight to contradict that 
 law of perpetual variation, which we know to reign 
 in the process of human affairs, as in all other mani- 
 festations of Nature. It is needless to say that 
 this appearance is delusive ; changes occur in 
 France as elsewhere. And, owing perhaps to 
 this very capacity for logic in the French, they 
 occur there in the most startling and dramatic 
 way : generally in the way of a complete volte-face ; 
 all must be pulled down, all must be built anew. 
 Napoleon has hardly climbed to the height of his 
 uncertain despotism, when he proceeds to remodel 
 the whole religious and social life of the nation, as 
 if he were founding an empire for eternity, instead 
 of for eleven years. He falls, and Monarchy 
 and Republic follow each other with bewildering 
 rapidity. Nevertheless below the surface, scintil- 
 
 A
 
 2 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 lating with coups d'Etat and proclamations, appeals 
 to the people and counter-proclamations, all based 
 on mutually exclusive first principles, the work of 
 slow and gradual transition goes on. The char- 
 acter of an individual does not move as quickly as 
 his mere intellect : still more uneven in their gait 
 are mental and temperamental changes in a nation. 
 This law of variability, the condition of all life, was 
 never more completely ignored than in the France 
 of the seventeenth century. All then was built 
 for eternity, and seemed, indeed, in a fair way to 
 possess it. The great chateaux of the period, 
 some of which, spared by the Revolution, still 
 stand as symbols of that brilliant past, did not 
 defy the hand of time more audaciously than the 
 theories of its philosophers, theologians and poli- 
 ticians. They were more successful in their de- 
 fiance, because masonry, if good enough, enjoys a 
 permanence denied to systems of thought. From 
 the great King himself one of the few kings who 
 have also been statesmen down to the lay-sisters 
 of Port Royal, all, whether their cause were the 
 political greatness of the nation, the superiority of 
 the Ancients over the Moderns, or the niceties 
 of prevenient Grace, fought in it from the point of 
 view which may be supposed to animate St. 
 Michael in his contest with Lucifer. Truth was 
 absolute, Truth was eternal, error must, in the long
 
 FONTENELLE 3 
 
 run, fail from a sort of metaphysical necessity. It 
 was but a dream, though a great and majestic one, 
 and France has not yet got through the throes of 
 her awakening. Nevertheless some of the acutest 
 intellects that have ever been, took it for a reality. 
 Let us humble ourselves. 
 
 There could be no greater mistake than to 
 imagine that the affirmations of the seventeenth 
 century in thought, in theology, in statecraft, were 
 but vain forms of words, idly repeated by a genera- 
 tion which had no taste for speculative inquiry. 
 On the contrary, that century was a far more 
 truly philosophical period than the succeeding one 
 which usurped the name. Pascal, the Prometheus 
 of modern Catholicism, stands alone in the magni- 
 ficence of his despair, Descartes and Malebranche 
 are the two French philosophers who have a real 
 claim to be considered metaphysicians. The 
 genius of the age was constructive in every de- 
 partment of human affairs. It was constructive, 
 and it undertook its task in an a priori spirit. 
 Every one argued from absolute premisses to irre- 
 fragable conclusions. It was not only the party in 
 authority that did so; Jurieu treated the recalci- 
 trant Bayle in precisely the same way as he himself 
 had been treated by Bossuet. It did not occur to 
 any one to appeal to facts, partly because most of 
 the controversies in the air could hardly be affected
 
 4 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 by such an appeal, and partly because men had 
 hardly come to recognise their relevance to their 
 own well-being. Yet, just then, unsuspected by 
 philosophers and theologians, after an interval of 
 centuries, during which men had a free hand with 
 which to fashion a cosmos in their own image, the 
 Fact was being born again into the world of human 
 significance. It was their unconsciousness of this 
 which delivered these great thinkers bound into 
 the hands of their successors of the following cen- 
 tury, men as a rule considerably their inferiors, 
 both in intellect and imagination. Already when 
 the glory of Lewis the Great was at its height, 
 when Bossuet's Universal History appeared to 
 culminate, and thereby find its justification in the 
 Church and State of France, the man was born 
 who represented in his life and work, more com- 
 pletely perhaps than any contemporary, the coming 
 spirit of negation and criticism which was surely to 
 sap the foundations of that splendid edifice. That 
 man was Fontenelle. 
 
 Bernard le Bovier, Sieur de Fontenelle, was born 
 at Rouen in 1657. It was one of his originalities 
 to live to be a centenarian, an originality which en- 
 abled him to fill successively the r61es of prophet 
 and traditional authority. To the seventeenth 
 century he prophesied of what was to come, and 
 to the eighteenth he stood as a reminder of its
 
 FONTENELLE 5 
 
 origins. No one contributed more than he did to 
 the bringing about of that vast change in opinion 
 which occurred during his lifetime. 
 
 The right view of Fontenelle is not quite easy. 
 No one was ever less like an apostle of new and 
 unwelcome truths. He was the first specimen of 
 a new race of writers. He wrote poetry without 
 being a poet, philosophy without being a philo- 
 sopher, science without being an experimentalist. 
 He does not appear to have had a passion for 
 truth, but, on the whole, to have preferred it ; 
 the gossip of his time reflects him as moved by 
 a tempered curiosity, mitigated by a love of ease 
 and good food. Voltaire, whose enthusiasm could 
 hardly brook so measured a zeal, summed him up, 
 not without a touch of malice, as ' le discret Fon- 
 tenelle.' His bonne amie, Mme. du Tencin, 
 placing her hand on his heart one day, said to 
 him: 'Vous riavez Id que du cerveau' Although 
 he allowed Mme. de Lambert to be his almoner, 
 he appeared to pride himself on his egotism. To 
 him is attributed the well-known recipe for happi- 
 ness tenir le cceur froid et Festomac chaud. He 
 may have thought it, but it would hardly have 
 been in keeping with his discretion to have said 
 so. His wit was inimitable. An aged lady having 
 one day said to him : ' It seems that Providence 
 has forgotten us on this earth,' ' Chut, on pourra
 
 6 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 nous entendre,' replied Fontenelle, placing his 
 finger on his mouth with an air of mystery. His 
 main characteristic was moderation in all things, a 
 moderation which evidently must have been based 
 on singularly torpid senses. Mme. Geoffrin tells us 
 that he never laughed or wept, he was never in a 
 hurry, and never even approximated to losing his 
 temper. When he took an apartment he left the 
 furniture exactly as he found it, without changing a 
 nail. Most wonderful of all, when he had gout, 
 it was painless ; ' seulement son pied devenait du 
 coton, il le posait sur un fauteuil, et c'etait tout.' 
 
 Before proceeding to the part he played in 
 forming his age, it will be useful to consider, rather 
 more in detail, the nature of that great change in 
 human opinion to which I have already referred, 
 and which marks off the eighteenth from the pre- 
 ceding century. Bossuet gave to the absolutism, 
 both civil and ecclesiastical, of his time a final and 
 classical expression ; in order, then, to know what it 
 was that the eighteenth century superseded, it is to 
 Bossuet that we must go. One of the clearest heads 
 and greatest masters of style that ever lived, he 
 never leaves us in any doubt as to his meaning. 
 ' If,' says Sir James Stephen, ' it were the order of 
 nature that God should be represented upon earth 
 by infallible priests and irresponsible kings, it would 
 be impossible to imagine a nobler system of educa-
 
 FONTENELLE 7 
 
 tion for a great king than that which Bossuet con- 
 ceived, or a teacher better suited to carry it out 
 than Bossuet himself.' The education of the ill- 
 fated dauphin furnished him with the occasion for 
 the expression of his theory of human life. The 
 Connaissance de Dieu et de Soi-mme, the Discours 
 sur tHistoire Universelle, and the Politique tirte 
 de PEcriture Sainte, were the three divisions into 
 which his teaching naturally fell, and these books 
 remain for ever among the finest examples of the 
 constructive power of human genius and the most 
 important landmarks in the history of European 
 thought. Their rhetoric is so ample and so mag- 
 nificent, their reasoning so close and so solid, that 
 even now one is tempted to overlook the baseless- 
 ness of their premisses, and can hardly believe that 
 so substantial-seeming a fabric melts under criti- 
 cism into 'air, thin air,' with all 'the cloud-capped 
 towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples ' 
 of its visionary splendour. 
 
 Renan has told us that the mediaeval scholastic 
 was, in spite of his mysticism, a sound rationalist, 
 i.e. he accepted the fact of revelation as the ultimate 
 term of a process of reasoning which started from 
 grounds level with the rest of experience, and that 
 it was not until such grounds had given way, that 
 ecclesiastical apologists were driven to ' prove the 
 divinity of Jesus Christ by the battle of Marengo.'
 
 8 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Bossuet would have shared Renan's contempt for 
 the modern apologists of ' Fideism.' It certainly 
 would be hard to find in Voltaire or in Tom Paine 
 a more uncompromising expression of the principles 
 of the early rationalists than the following little 
 piece of epistemology which occurs in the De la 
 Connaissance de Dieu et de Soi-m$me. ' The 
 understanding (1'entendement) is the light which 
 God has given us for our guidance. It has different 
 names ; in its inventive and penetrating capacity it 
 is called spirit (esprit) : in so far as it judges and 
 directs to truth and goodness, it is called reason 
 and judgment. Reason, in so far as it turns us 
 from the true evil of man, which is sin, is called 
 conscience.' And he says that reason, if not 
 seduced by passion, is infallible. ' The understand- 
 ing is never forced to err, and never does so except 
 from want of attention : and if it judges wrongly by 
 following the senses or passions derived from them 
 : too readily, it will correct its judgment if a right will 
 make it attentive to its object and itself' (The 
 italics are mine.) Certainly Bossuet cannot be said 
 to err in putting the power of reason too low. 
 What was it, then, he lacked? He lacked facts, or 
 rather he took for facts what were not facts, and 
 the reason he did so was that he had no criticism. 
 His superb eloquence and the rationalism of his 
 process blinded him to the sources of his premisses,
 
 FONTENELLE 9 
 
 which were, in truth, his conclusions. He some- 
 what naively betrays himself in his controversy 
 with Richard Simon, the Oratorian father, who, 
 two centuries before Loisy, maintained in the 
 Catholic Church the right of reason to investigate 
 the title-deeds of theology. ' Les dates font tout en 
 ces matter es !' he cries. Yes, indeed. All the 
 more reason, one would think, to subject them to 
 the severest scrutiny. Let us, however, not be 
 unjust. It would be idle and absurd to blame 
 Bossuet for his lack of acquaintance with the science 
 of historical criticism ; it is not illegitimate to 
 deplore the spirit of blind certitude which prevented 
 him understanding the nature and relevance of Pere 
 Simon's inquiries. He seems to have regarded 
 such speculations from that purely conventional and 
 professional point of view which the more educated 
 Christian pulpit of to-day, whether Catholic or 
 Protestant, does not hesitate to disavow. The 
 view which Bossuet derived from, among others, 
 ' quatre ou cinq faits authentiques et plus clairs que 
 la lumiere du soleil (qui) font voir notre religion 
 aussi ancienne que le monde' one gasps at the 
 statement was one of the most complete and 
 universal absolutism. Whatever might be said 
 about nature, it was indeed the divine order ' that 
 God should be represented upon earth by infallible 
 priests and irresponsible kings.' And the chain of
 
 10 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 such representatives had never been broken. ' From 
 Innocent XL, who fills to-day so worthily the first 
 place in the Church,' he traces back that august 
 line through St. Peter and the Pontiffs of the ancient 
 Law to Moses and Aaron : ' de la jusqu'a 1'origine du 
 monde ! quelle suite, quelle tradition, quel enseigne- 
 ment merveilleux ! ' One is reminded of Pascal's 
 ' Sem qui a vu Lamech, qui a vu Adam, a vu aussi 
 Jacob qui a vu ceux qui ont vu Moise. Done le 
 deluge et la creation sont vrais.' Certainly Bossuet 
 was right, as a matter of tactics, in resenting criti- 
 cism of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. 
 He was right, that is to say, so long as it was 
 possible to suppress such criticism by other than 
 critical methods : but although he knew it not, the 
 day of such absolute power, whether in the realm 
 of opinion or politics, was drawing to its close. 
 And now we may return to the part played by 
 Fontenelle in the transition. 
 
 What that transition led to primarily was the 
 emancipation of the individual judgment from the 
 control of authority of any kind. This emancipa- 
 tion constituted the first ' moment ' of modern 
 rationalism. In that moment the individual was 
 conceived as self-subsisting, infallible in his under- 
 standing (to which understanding, precisely repro- 
 duced in every human being, ' Reality ' was exactly 
 correlative), and perfect in will, i.e. spontaneously
 
 FONTENELLE 11 
 
 and naturally good. Ignorance and sin, moral and 
 intellectual evil, were brought about by the environ- 
 ment of humanity, and were due to the institutions 
 which prevented man's understanding and will 
 having free play. Taken as a whole and in its 
 maturity this attitude represents the most naive 
 and simple form of individualistic optimism. Its 
 philosopher was Voltaire and its religion was 
 Deism ; and the French Revolution and Kant were 
 lying in wait for it. Though the apprehensions on 
 which the movement was based were essentially 
 positive, its first attitude was inevitably one of 
 negation negation of the values enshrined in the 
 system with which it found itself in conflict. That 
 system, as we have seen, held the whole of human 
 life in the meshes of authority ; the first task of 
 the emancipators was then to dislodge authority. 
 Until that was done nothing could be done. Now 
 the phenomenal basis of the Church's authority was 
 as such, unsound, for the facts on which it was 
 alleged to rest could not be proved. Bossuet's line 
 of communication between Heaven and Earth was 
 discovered, on investigation, to be non-existent. 
 This was the position of the early rationalists, and 
 so far they were right, and, as long as the Church 
 confined her apologetics to mere empiricism, she 
 was bound to be beaten, for she was not so good 
 an empiricist as the philosophes. When, however,
 
 12 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 from being negative, they became positive, and 
 took over human nature themselves on the schema- 
 tism of the authority of the understanding, relying 
 on the formal contraries of the Church's ethical 
 teaching, on i.e. the natural rectitude of each 
 human will as such, and on the perfectibility, in 
 terms of present experience, of humanity considered 
 as an aggregate of individuals, they failed. Kant 
 blew up their naive objectivism, showed that the 
 Deistic God who was conceived as a part only of all 
 reality was a mass of contradictions insoluble to 
 the individual understanding, while the Revolution 
 and its resulting reactions gave pause to their social 
 speculations. So it comes about that the name of 
 a pioneer of the movement like Fontenelle is mainly 
 associated with rebellion against the Church. 
 M. Faguet has severely criticised his methods. 
 I would suggest in deprecation of his criticism that 
 it cannot have been very easy at the time to see 
 how such an attack could be led. For although 
 ecclesiastical authority could not, in strict logic and 
 theology, have axiomatic value, for its existence 
 was given as a phenomenal fact, based like others 
 on evidence, appealing finally to the individual 
 judgment, yet in process of time it had naturally 
 enough come to have some such value for its 
 adherents. And, at the time of which I am writing, 
 only very few French men or women were not its
 
 FONTENELLE 13 
 
 adherents. Moreover, on the Catholic premisses, 
 the moral values of life were inextricably inter- 
 twined with the assents of Faith : it was impossible 
 to prove the purity of the motives which led to 
 their rejection. If the orthodox were unable to 
 impute that favourite commonplace of the contro- 
 versial pulpit, a desire for sensual indulgence, to the 
 Freethinkers, they could always fall back upon 
 pride, an absolutely unanswerable charge. Also 
 it must be remembered that although Louis xiv 
 had refused, at the time of the Revocation of the 
 Edict of Nantes, to re-establish the suppressed 
 Inquisition, the Parliament of Paris did not scruple 
 to use force in defence of orthodoxy. All this 
 rendered necessary, or appeared to render neces- 
 sary, to the great men who began the emancipation 
 of the French mind, a course of systematic conceal- 
 ment of the real extent of their dissent from the 
 popular creed, which, in our own day, would be 
 repugnant, it may be hoped, to both the defenders 
 and the opponents of any established form of 
 Christianity. 
 
 It is impossible to deny that Fontenelle had a 
 natural aptitude for the part. Indeed, so admirably 
 fitted was he for it that, on the providential theory 
 of the apparition of great men, such a coincidence 
 between the workman and the task seems to speak 
 incontrovertibly in favour of a special design. To
 
 14 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 say as much as this is to admit that Fontenelle's 
 character leaves much to be desired : I have 
 already pointed out that it was not through the 
 individual superiority of their champions that the 
 ideas of the eighteenth century succeeded in 
 replacing those of the preceding one. It was the 
 stars in their courses that fought for them, the 
 process of nature, the unconscious dialectic of 
 things, that was their secret accomplice. 
 
 Fontenelle's first appearance in literature, apart 
 from his share in the quarrel of the Ancients and 
 the Moderns, with which we are here hardly 
 concerned, was, oddly enough, as a poet. It has 
 been ingeniously remarked that while his ideas 
 were in advance of his time, his style was behind 
 it. This is true of his poetry at least. His 
 Pastorales, his Bergeries and his Eglogues are pure 
 Louis xni. Inane and insipid as they are, they 
 are, however, without the note of falseness charac- 
 teristic of the genre. His shepherds do not talk 
 like poets and philosophers, and he cleverly avoids 
 the snare of the literary convention of rusticity. 
 This is something to be thankful for, but not to be 
 false is not enough for art. His Coryns and 
 Phebes are pure nullities. They simply do not 
 exist at all. In his Discours sur la nature de 
 tliglogue he naively remarks : ' La posie pastorale 
 n'a pas grand charme si elle ne roule que sur les
 
 FONTENELLE 15 
 
 choses de la campagne. Entendre parler de 
 brebis et de chevres cela n'a rien par soi-meme qui 
 puisse plaire.' The opinion is defensible, but 
 seems out of place on the lips of a pastoral poet. 
 He appears to have seen only one thing in the 
 ' simple life,' namely leisure, and judges, in his 
 dispassionate way, that this would probably lead to 
 an unusual development of amativeness. So he 
 gives us scenes of a cool and measured gallantry, 
 in which neither his own nor his reader's interest 
 is ever for a moment seriously engaged. One 
 imagines him reading them aloud to Mme. du 
 Tencin or Mme. de Lambert, punctuated by the 
 handling of his snuff-box, and an occasional 
 drawing-room smirk. Truly, ' Cest une chose 
 dune tristesse morne, que les juvenilia dun homme 
 qui ria jamais eu de jeunesse' It is unnecessary 
 even to mention his tragedies, which are the 
 productions, says M. Faguet, of a man who is the 
 nephew of Corneille, but who appears to be his 
 uncle. Fontenelle was clever enough to realise in 
 time that he had mistaken his vocation. Perhaps 
 it came home to him when he was correcting 
 the proofs of his fourth Eclogue, in which occurs 
 what is surely the most unpoetical line ever written 
 in metre : 
 
 1 Quand on a le coeur tendre, il ne faut pas qu'on aime.' 
 
 La Bruyere, who hated him, gave him a place
 
 16 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 among his ' Caracteres ' as Cydias. ' Cydias (est) 
 bel esprit : c'est sa profession. II a une enseigne, 
 un atelier, des ouvrages de commande, et des 
 compagnes qui travaille sous lui. Prose, vers, que 
 voulez-vous ? il rdussit egalement en Tun et en 
 1'autre. Demandez-lui des lettres de consolation, 
 ou sur une absence, il les entreprendra ; prenez les 
 toutes faites et entrez dans son magasin, il y a a 
 choisir.' There is this amount of truth under La 
 Bruyere's rather savage attack, that Fontenelle, 
 while entirely devoid of enthusiasm, except on one 
 subject which we will shortly consider, possessed 
 so supple a brain as to produce the effect of a 
 universal intelligence. As a poet he failed, nor 
 need his failure surprise us, for more than a supple 
 brain is required for the production of poetry. 
 The fact is that he was a characteristic and 
 magnificent man of letters, being, indeed', the first 
 specimen of that type which was to play so 
 important a part throughout the eighteenth century. 
 Now the man of letters, as such, does not need to 
 be an original thinker, still less need he be a 
 creative artist. On the other hand he requires, in 
 order to fulfil his functions in the republic of the 
 mind, a quick and facile intelligence, apt to seize 
 the finer shades of opinion, all of which he should 
 be ready to welcome in turn. For he must be 
 without prejudices of any kind, which, in the
 
 FONTENELLE 17 
 
 average state of human nature, is tantamount to 
 saying he must eschew personal convictions. He 
 is skilled to detect the real trend of ideas ; among 
 contemporary notions he readily, and, as it were, 
 instinctively, distinguishes those that are pregnant 
 with the future from merely associational survivals. 
 He is to the thinkers who are the creative forces of 
 the time, what the /tatt/*-writer is to the moral 
 philosopher, he circulates the small change of their 
 ideas. He can only permit himself one passion, 
 curiosity : but the more he has of that the better. 
 Fontenelle was all this in a supreme degree. I 
 have said that he had one enthusiasm. There was / 
 one thing in which that dilettante, indifferent spirit/ ; 
 really did believe, and that one thing was science. 
 Here he showed the flair of the perfect man of 
 letters, in recognising, almost at its birth, the new 
 energy yphich was to play such a part in the 
 immediate future, while, at the same time, he 
 gratified his curiosity, the most fundamental and 
 serious tendency of his nature. Already, in 1680, 
 when St. Simon had set the fashion to the Court of 
 an occasional retreat in the austere cloisters of de 
 Ranee, Fontenelle was in the habit of disappearing 
 for several days at a time. He was not at La 
 Trappe, but in a little house in the Faubourg St. 
 Jacques. Here he used to meet and confer with 
 the mathematician Varignon, the Abbe de St.
 
 18 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Pierre, and other scientific persons. This little 
 house was, indeed, the cradle of the eighteenth 
 century in France. If Bayle provided in his 
 dictionary an arsenal of sceptical arguments for the 
 philosophes to direct against the Church, it was 
 from the cenacle of the Faubourg St. Jacques that 
 the positive side of the movement proceeded. 
 That positive side aimed at what all the scepticism 
 in the world never could have effected, the 
 substitution of the prestige of science for that of 
 I the Church. It is often said that Fontenelle, 
 [unlike those robust dogmatists who carried the 
 I movement which he had helped to initiate to its 
 ; maturity, was a sceptic. It is very much a 
 question of words. All who question the values of 
 popular theology or politics are apt to incur the 
 charge. For it is the nature of those values to 
 be held by those who maintain them with such 
 immediacy of conviction that discussion of any kind 
 is apt to seem an irrelevant impertinence, more or 
 less certainly of the nature of doubt. I do not think 
 that Fontenelle was in doubt on the subject of 
 Christian theology, as the tradition of the Church 
 of his day presented it. In spite of his cautious 
 mode of expression, of the modesty or diplomacy 
 with which he refrained from pushing his 
 arguments to their legitimate conclusion, from 
 committing himself to an open breach with ecclesi-
 
 FONTENELLE 19 , 
 
 astical authority, there is, I think, no sort of doubt 
 that he positively, and with full conviction, rejected 
 the whole system. The Fathers of the Society of 
 Jesus, who are not supposed to be particularly 
 stupid people, were quick to detect the ' essential 
 impiety' of his Histoire des Oracles, which is, 
 ostensibly, a defence of pure religion from the 
 ill-informed zeal of its misguided advocates. Nay, 
 we must go further. Not only do I think that 
 Fontenelle was definitely anti-Christian, but it 
 seems unquestionable that his mind, his tempera- 
 ment, his character, call it what you will, was 
 incurably hostile to religion of any kind. He did 
 not accept the Church's Messiah, and felt no sort 
 of necessity to look for another. The good 
 Fathers were right, his impiety was essential. To 
 slightly alter a well-known ecclesiastical formula, 
 he may be said to have been invincibly irreligious. 
 This appears I think very clearly in his Entretiens 
 sur la Pluralite 1 des Mondes, which is interesting as 
 being one of the first attempts at the popularisation 
 of science. It was published in 1686. Fontenelle 
 says in the preface that he asks the same attention 
 from ladies in order to understand all he has to 
 tell them 'tout ce systeme de philosophic' as 
 is required to enjoy the Princesse de Cleves. And 
 so clear is his exposition, that his astronomy reads 
 like a novel. The book had an immediate and
 
 20 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 immense success. Toutes ces danies devoured it 
 eagerly, which shows the ground covered in fifteen 
 years since the publication of the Femmes Savantes. 
 In 1671 the Entretiens would have died of ridicule. 
 The form is very characteristic. The astronomer 
 shows the heavens at night to a charming mar- 
 quise, whose questions and comments enable him 
 to relieve the strain of the reader's attention, by 
 neatly turned compliments and gallant epigrams. 
 The marquise having remarked that the beauty of 
 the day is that of a brilliant blonde, while the 
 beauty of the night possesses the more touching 
 quality of the brunette, her instructor replies : ' J'en 
 conviens : mais en recompense une blonde comme 
 vous me ferait encore mieux rever que la plus belle 
 nuit du monde avec toute sa beaute brune.' The 
 little book is not, however, made up of such courtly 
 trifling. It goes far, very far. ' II serait embaras- 
 sant en theologie qu'il y eut des hommes qui ne 
 descendissent point d'Adam . . . mais je ne mets 
 dans la lune que des habitants qui ne sont point 
 des hommes.' A valuable concession indeed to a 
 theologian inclined to embarrassment. This insidi- 
 ous remark is a good instance of Fontenelle's anti- 
 i theological tactics. But it is not in such feline 
 strokes of the paw, that the bias of the book is most 
 apparent. It is rather in the complete absence of 
 any religious sentiment, or even poetical emotion at
 
 FONTENELLE 21 
 
 all. The author shows himself blankly unreceptive 
 of the feelings which, a hundred years later, would 
 stir the imagination of a Kant, when contemplating 
 the starry heavens. The Origine des Fables and 
 the Histoire des Oracles are masterpieces of quiet 
 malice. He tells us in the Origine des Fables that 
 the history of all nations, Greeks, Gauls, Romans, 
 Americans and Chinese, begins with fables . . . ' all 
 nations, that is, except the Chosen People, among 
 whom a special attention of Providence has pre- 
 served the truth.' Here the very qualification 
 which saves the orthodoxy of the statement is 
 made to gently insinuate its own improbability. 
 In the Histoire des Oracles, a work adapted from 
 the Dutch of one Van Dale, he establishes that the 
 Pagan oracles were not the work of demons, and 
 did not cease at the death of Christ. The thesis 
 seems innocent enough, but Fontenelle's treatment 
 of it leaves the reader with the conviction that 
 demons and oracles of every kind are more than 
 suspicious : a conviction which he must be slow- 
 witted indeed not to be inclined to apply to Rome 
 as much as to Delphi. Yet nothing has been said 
 that would formally justify such a conclusion. 
 Certainly his attack on revelation lost nothing in 
 acuteness for being disguised under the mantle of 
 an exquisitely pudic orthodoxy that shrank from 
 the contagion of superstition.
 
 22 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Fontenelle reaches his greatest height of para- 
 doxical brilliancy in his well-known Dialogues des 
 Marts, published in 1686. Of this book Voltaire 
 wrote to Frederic in 1751, ' Le defaut de Fon- 
 tenelle, c'est qu'il veut toujours avoir de 1'esprit. 
 C'est toujours lui qu'on voit, et jamais ses heros ; 
 il leur fait dire le contraire de ce qu'ils devraient 
 dire, il soutient le pour et le contre, il ne veut que 
 briller.' Was that, after all, so grave a fault, good 
 Master ? And does the criticism come well from the 
 author of S##/and other historical face'ties ? How- 
 ever we may explain this unfavourable judgment, 
 and there is more than one alternative to its being 
 the expression of unbiassed opinion, it remains a fact 
 that Voltaire himself never wrote anything wittier 
 than these imaginary conversations. Their verve 
 is inimitable, and never flags for a moment, there is 
 not a dull line in all the forty. Fontenelle chooses 
 the most delightfully incongruous companions for 
 the discussion of every subject under the sun. 
 Faustina proves to Brutus that her conduct to 
 Marcus Aurelius was of a most disinterested de- 
 scription and was dictated by the very same motives 
 which led Brutus to murder his friend. Erasti- 
 trates, a physician of antiquity, considerably damps 
 the enthusiasm of Harvey, over the benefits which 
 his discovery has conferred on mankind, by the 
 remark that he does not observe any diminution in
 
 FONTENELLE 23 
 
 the number of annual arrivals on the shores of 
 Styx. Socrates explains to Montaigne that anti- 
 quity was a poor affair after all, and that there 
 were just as many fools and knaves in the Athens 
 of his day, as in the Paris which Montaigne knew. 
 
 The Dialogues gives us the answer to the ques- \ 
 tion of Fontenelle's scepticism. As we have seen, | 
 he was no sceptic in matters of religion, being : 
 definitely anti-religious on positive grounds ; nor 
 was he a sceptic in what he called experimental 
 philosophy, i.e. science, where he found indeed his 
 one point of certitude. Where he was a sceptic 
 was in morals. Not that he doubted that the, 
 guidance of reason was what men required in order 
 to be good and happy, but he more than suspected 
 that the nature of things did not in fact permit 1 
 such a result, except in so small a minority of cases 
 as to leave the world, in the main, a stage for 
 knaves and fools. The wise should be encouraged 
 to get what amusement they could from the spec- 
 tacle. He used to say in later years, that the 
 amount of enthusiasm around him frightened him. 
 The important thing to note about this tempera- 
 mental attitude for, although he may have sup- 
 ported it by argument, it was that au fond is its 
 difference from that of the second generation of 
 the eighteenth century, of the philosophers who 
 carried the movement of emancipation into the
 
 24 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 political sphere. One sees the sort of imaginary 
 dialogue which Fontenelle would have put on the 
 lips of, say, Turgot and Machiavelli. 
 
 His other important work is his Mdmoires of the 
 Academy of the Sciences, of which he was per- 
 petual secretary. It was one of his duties to write 
 dloges of the deceased academicians. For once 
 Cydias becomes almost enthusiastic and really elo- 
 quent. He realised the dignity and beauty of 
 these workers' lives, and he makes us feel them 
 in a series of short biographies which really can 
 hardly be too highly praised. The simple virtues 
 of these great men, their probity, their immense 
 and peaceful labours, their delightful piety, like 
 that of Ozanan, who said it belonged to the Sor- 
 bonne to dispute, to the Pope to decide, and to the 
 mathematician to go to Heaven in a perpendicular 
 straight line ; or their simplicity, like that of the 
 great chemist who said of the Regent: 'Je le 
 connais, j'ai frequente dans son laboratoire. Oh, 
 c'est un rude travailleur ! ' all the features of their 
 blameless existences are lovingly and carefully 
 detailed. We are surprised to find another Fon- 
 tenelle, very different to the author of the Dialogues 
 des Morts, a Fontenelle who does not sneer, who 
 has almost forgotten to be epigrammatic. Almost, 
 but not quite. We are told that M. Dodart 
 ' accompagnait de toutes les lumieres de la raison
 
 FONTENELLE 25 
 
 la respectable obscuritd de la foi.' Science had 
 seized him, and having seized him never let him 
 go. His nimble brain moved easily in what he 
 called experimental philosophy. And it is in his j 
 services to science not the services of an inde- 
 pendent discoverer, but the no less necessary ones 
 of the writer who familiarises the world with the 
 results obtained by specialists in their laboratory 
 or at their telescope that his real contribution to 
 his time and the transitional movement of his time 
 consists. He died happily and peacefully, aged 
 ninety-nine years and eleven months, with the 
 characteristic words on his lips: 'J'eprouve une 
 difficult^ d'etre.' And the Academic des Sciences 
 has never had such a good secretary since.
 
 26 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 THE centenary of Prosper Merimee four years ago, 
 passed practically unnoticed, which is perhaps what 
 that eminent person, who had an almost comical 
 horror of popular appreciation, would have liked. 
 One can imagine the sort of letter he would have 
 written on September 27, 1903, to some 'Unknown 
 Friend' among the shades in description of the 
 celebration of his memory, if, in fact, his com- 
 patriots had remembered him. As it is, they 
 saved him the trouble. ' A few words ' were mur- 
 mured by that veteran Professor of the Sorbonne, 
 M. Emile Faguet, an article appeared here and 
 there in the French press, but these voices had 
 little, if any, echo. Perhaps the official world of 
 M. Combes was detached from such purely 
 academic interests. The fact is that Merime'e, 
 alive or dead, is not available for the objects of 
 popular propaganda. Both as a man and as an 
 artist his appeal was, and still is, to a small circle. 
 It may be worth our while to try and discover in 
 what the value of that appeal consists.
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 27 
 
 The extreme conscientiousness and integrity of 
 soul of the artist renders it justifiable to seek that 
 value not only in his written word. MerimeVs 
 personality was a work of art as sincerely con- 
 ceived, as deftly composed, as logically worked out 
 as any of his own stories. So his personality may 
 come, in fairness, to be considered as more than an 
 essential element in rather as one, and that an 
 essential aspect of his contribution, the 'moi 
 haissable ' (so great an artist was he in life as well 
 as letters), being as dexterously concealed in the 
 daily habit of the man of the world, the mondain, 
 as in the pages of the writer. 
 
 It would doubtless have annoyed him exces- 
 sively to be told that the key to the success with 
 which he handled such a multiplicity and com- 
 plexity of interests, was to be found in the pages 
 of the Imitation of Christ ; yet few men have 
 carried out so consistently the exhortation, ' Sibi 
 unitus et simplificatus esse.' I shall therefore 
 make no apology for adopting here a method of 
 criticism which is, in most cases, rightly held to be 
 illegitimate. Artistic creation is nearly always a 
 special function of the brain, and, for the most 
 part, unrelated, at least obviously, to the rest of the 
 artist's life. 
 
 Prosper Merimee was born a hundred years ago 
 on September 28th. His father, Jean-FranQois
 
 28 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Leonor, was a painter of mediocre quality who, 
 after some moderate success with the brush, had 
 intelligence enough to recognise his own calibre 
 and to resign the practice of painting for its study. 
 He became professor at the Iicole Polytechnique 
 and Secretary of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He 
 was the author of a history of oil painting, and 
 spent much of his time in his laboratory experi- 
 menting on the chemical constituents of colours. 
 Jean- Francois, when in middle life, met in a pension, 
 where he gave lessons, a girl named Anna Moreau, 
 neither rich nor beautiful, whom he married. The 
 mother of Prosper would seem to have been a 
 remarkable woman. M. Filon describes her as 
 ' un caractere ferme, un esprit prompt, de nature 
 seche et gaie.' He adds that she was peacefully 
 and invincibly irreligious, the reverse of senti- 
 mental, and very faithful to her duties and her 
 affections. She painted with some skill, and was 
 a fascinating raconteuse. Her portraits of children 
 gained her a certain reputation, and are said to 
 have owed part of their success to the way in 
 which she fixed the attention of her young models 
 by the delightful stories with which she would 
 beguile the hours of sitting. In a word, she was 
 just the mother indicated for Merimee on Schopen- 
 hauer's theory of heredity. At least it would 
 appear that Prosper inherited his brain from her ;
 
 PROSPER MRIME 29 
 
 and that not merely in the sense of intellectual 
 power alone, but also in the whole turn and cast of 
 his mind. In her we see his love of anecdote 
 (his best work consists really of exquisitely fin- 
 ished anecdote), his horror of sentimentality, of 
 pkurnicherie, his aversion to religion of all kinds. 
 
 In 1821 Frangois Merime'e wrote to his friend 
 Fabre, a painter of Montpellier, who had succeeded 
 Alfieri in the affections of the Countess of Albany : 
 ' J'ai un grand fils de dix-huit ans dont je voudrais 
 bien faire un avocat . . . toujours dlevd a la 
 maison, il a de bonnes mceurs et de 1'instruction.' 
 
 Reading for the Bar in Paris, as in London, is 
 not incompatible with other and more romantic 
 interests, and the future Academician found time 
 to make many literary friends. J. J. Ampere and 
 Albert Stapfer were among his intimates. Stapfer 
 was an interesting and charming person, the son 
 of the Swiss minister. He represented a type far 
 too rare among us to-day, though frequently to be 
 met with a hundred years ago, being indeed a 
 survival from the eighteenth century. Endowed 
 with considerable literary ability, he seems to have 
 lacked personal ambition or the desire for money, 
 and was content to remain a spectator of the 
 battles of letters, excelling in intimacy as a wise 
 critic and brilliant talker. Such men are the salt 
 of society ; in the eighteenth century they alone
 
 30 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 constituted the literary 'public.' Me'rime'e used to 
 frequent the house of Stapfer's father, now retired 
 from diplomacy and definitely settled in Paris in 
 the midst of the intellectual society he loved. 
 
 Here the 'jeunes' used to assemble. While 
 their elders counted their honours at whist, they 
 would gather in a corner round a stout, dark, 
 square-faced man with little flaming eyes. It was 
 no less a personage than Stendhal. Sometimes 
 his hearers were distracted by the fluent rhetoric 
 of a young professor of philosophy, Victor Cousin, 
 on which occasions the great man would grunt 
 with impatience and growl forth the characteristic 
 appreciation : ' Depuis Bossuet personne n'a joue 
 de la blague serieuse comme cet homme-la ! ' 
 
 And here we must dwell for a moment on the 
 influence of Stendhal over Merimee, who, fortu- 
 nately, has left us an invaluable document on his 
 one and only master. These few pages on Henri 
 Beyle in his Portraits Historiques et Littdraires, 
 tell us quite as much about their writer as their 
 subject. Our criticisms of our friends not un- 
 frequently represent the reactions they produce in 
 ourselves, unconsciously objectified. Me'rime'e in 
 the particular case has admitted as much to one 
 of his unknown correspondents, though he has 
 declared in his published study of Stendhal that, 
 except for certain literary preferences and aver-
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 31 
 
 sions, they had scarcely an idea in common. That 
 this should have been so, at least at the moment 
 of their first meeting in 1820, is not surprising, 
 Beyle being then about forty, and Merimee barely 
 eighteen. 
 
 Beyle's formula is somewhat complex. A true 
 disciple of the eighteenth century, of Diderot and 
 the Encyclopaedists, he was nevertheless the father 
 of French nineteenth-century literature and the 
 authentic founder of the Romantic movement. 
 Victor Hugo did but invent the mediaeval staging 
 that gave that movement its vogue in the drawing- 
 rooms of the Restoration, and it was the splendour 
 of his genius that caused the play to become identi- 
 fied with the scenery in the public imagination. 
 There was no necessary connection between the 
 ideals of Christianity and the Romantic movement. 
 Indeed the spirit of its founder was emphatically 
 anti-Christian in the eighteenth-century manner of 
 D'Alembert, Condorcet, and Voltaire. The move- 
 ment was primarily a reaction against the conven- 
 tions which had enslaved the French drama, and, 
 so far, represented the claim of literature to find 
 its value in a true observation and sincere render- 
 ing of human life. To be a 'Romantic' in 1824 
 meant that one despised the sacred ' Unities,' that 
 one laughed at the Abb6 Auger ; that one had the 
 temerity to find Racine conventional and unsatis-
 
 32 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 fying. Beyle's pamphlet, Racine and Shakespeare, 
 in which the latter poet's truthfulness of observa- 
 tion, and daring disregard of the axioms of a 
 pedantic classicism are contrasted with the former's 
 rhetorical representation of the life of the passions 
 in a passionless vacuum of abstraction, was the 
 manifesto of the first period of the Romantic 
 movement, as the preface of Hugo's Cromwell 
 was of the second. 
 
 A foolish person once asked Beyle his pro- 
 fession. ' Observateur du cceur humain,' replied 
 the novelist ; and it is said that the foolish person 
 fled, convinced that the reply was a euphemism 
 for police-spy. The phrase certainly stands not 
 unfitly on the threshold of the nineteenth century, 
 as the formula of nearly all that century's literary 
 production. To it may be attached not only the 
 works of the Romantics properly so-called, but the 
 ' roman de mceurs,' the psychological novel, and 
 the labours of the self-styled naturalists. In per- 
 sonal character Beyle seems to have been a 
 puzzling mass of contradictions. He claimed to 
 be always guided by ' la Z,0gique ' (as he empha- 
 sised the word in pronunciation), but never, 
 according to Merimee, was there a more impulsive 
 and spontaneous creature. He imagined that he 
 had discovered his ideal of passion (up to which 
 he lived as well as wrote, in Italy). He had
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 33 
 
 doubtless found there abundant materials for its 
 incarnation, but the ideal is as old and universal 
 as the ' Fall.' His views on this subject were, 
 in fact, as elementary as they well could be in 
 a civilised man, and his appreciation of women 
 was precisely on a par with his criticism of 
 religion. As to the latter, whatever they might 
 say, the professors of all forms of religion were 
 necessarily hypocrites. His curious belief in the 
 absolute equality of the human mind precluded the 
 charitable alternative fools. The parallel may 
 be left to complete itself. It is nevertheless fair 
 to note that the experience which was to Beyle 
 the crown of life ' Beyle croyait qu'il n'y avait de 
 bonheur possible en ce monde que pour un homme 
 amoureux,' writes Me'rime'e was always to him 
 psychological and emotional rather than purely 
 physical ; it was always love of sorts not vice. 
 In all this he was a true child of the eighteenth 
 century. That century dealt invariably in absolute 
 judgments. Austere philosophers like d'Alem- 
 bert and Condorcet would have endorsed Beyle's 
 religious views, and would have had, at least, a 
 theoretic sympathy with his attitude in sexual 
 matters. As regards the criticism of religions, 
 the glimmerings of a genuine historical method 
 had not dawned on their consciousness, and the 
 Christian theory of continence, which they re- 
 
 c
 
 34 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 garded not altogether unjustifiably as in practice 
 the supreme hypocrisy of the Church, was to them 
 a very /3SeXuy/Aa rrj? e/oi?/u,aJcra>s of the human spirit. 
 
 It is easy to point out the insufficiency of the 
 anti-religious dogmatism of the Encyclopaedists. 
 Here, however, we are not concerned with philo- 
 sophy for its own sake, but only as a social 
 element in reaction. 
 
 The cataclysm of the Revolution had buried the 
 ancien regime, and with it, for a time at least, the 
 lofty hopes which had animated many of the 
 thinkers who had unconsciously done most to 
 render possible that time of terror. The Napo- 
 leonic epic intoxicated the opening years of the 
 new century with a chalice of blood and glory : 
 Europe awoke sceptical and weary after the 
 double nightmare. And France, who had given 
 this terrible object-lesson to the rest of the world, 
 was no less disillusioned. Now Mrim6e was a 
 prince of ' d6sillusionns.' 
 
 Sainte-Beuve heard from the lips of Madame 
 Merimee an anecdote of Prosper's childhood which 
 seemed to him to give the key to his character. 
 He committed some childish fault at the age of 
 five, which induced his mother to place him en 
 penitence outside the door of the studio where she 
 was working. Through the door the child im- 
 plored her pardon, making the most convincing
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 35 
 
 protestations of contrition. His mother paid no 
 attention. At last he opened the door, and 
 dragged himself towards her on his knees in so 
 grotesquely pathetic an attitude that she could 
 not prevent herself bursting into laughter. He 
 changed his tone, and said, rising : ' Eh bien, 
 puisqu'on se moque de moi, je ne demanderai 
 jamais plus pardon ! ' He kept, says Sainte-Beuve, 
 his resolution only too well. And his fidelity to it 
 was the true source of his profound irony. Years 
 afterwards Sainte-Beuve added to his note of 
 the anecdote a last reflection : ' S'il avait su le 
 Grec a cet age, il aurait pu prendre la devise qu'il 
 porta grave"e sur un cachet : Me/xj^o- 1 amo-reiv, 
 Souviens-toi de m^fier.' 
 
 We may accept the story for what it may be 
 worth, not forgetting that distrust of men and 
 things was in the psychological climate into which 
 Merime"e was born. Kant seemed to have clipped 
 for ever the wings of philosophy; post- Kantian 
 idealism had not yet attained its droit de citt in the 
 commonwealth of European thought, and if it had, 
 it may be doubted whether so cautious and cool a 
 head as Me"rimeVs would have yielded to its seduc- 
 tions. The apparently appalling results of popular 
 enthusiasm in the holiest of all causes the cause 
 of them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of 
 death had not been such as to encourage confi-
 
 36 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 dence in the immanent forces at work in the human 
 process. The old comely universe over which, 
 with benedictory episcopal hands, the ' Pater de 
 ccelis Deus ' of Christian tradition had presided, on 
 the whole benignly, was swept away, and the 
 promise of the new Heaven and Earth was but a 
 faltering one at best. In that old world where, in 
 spite of superficial disruptions, such as Black Deaths 
 and Thirty Years' Wars, all was really secure, 
 steadied by the Arms of the Eternal, it had been 
 possible, it had come to many naturally, to live 
 gracious and dignified lives of unremitting toil, 
 serenely confident in a providential disposition of 
 the fruits of their labours. 
 
 The ' fruits of philosophy ' had just recently been 
 bitter in the mouths of Frenchmen of that day. 
 Reaction or disillusion seemed the only alternatives 
 that lay before them. As a matter of fact Merimee 
 resigned himself to both. The stifling of French 
 liberties by Louis Napoleon's coup dEtat awoke no 
 protest from him, and he became a Senator of that 
 prince's short-lived Empire and Inspector of 
 National Monuments, while his art, as we shall 
 now proceed to see, was based on profound dis- 
 illusion. Disillusion is a term which depends for 
 its value on its context ; it may mean gain or loss ; 
 what was the balance in the case of Merimee ? 
 
 He was born into a society but recently emanci-
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 37 
 
 pated from the most effective and complete system 
 of religious idealisation that the world has ever 
 seen. There was no part of life to which that 
 system did not extend, no human emotion which it 
 had not made its own for good or for ill. Not 
 only by its own supreme emotional quality had it 
 seized and retained the emotions, but by means of 
 its transcendental values it had enormously increased 
 their momentum in certain directions. The three 
 fundamental theological virtues had dilated the 
 psychological capacity of man to an extent that 
 would have seemed impossible to a pre-Christian 
 thinker. Infinite Truth as the possession of Faith, 
 infinite bliss as the object of Hope, infinite love as 
 the reward of Charity such and no less formed 
 the inalienable birthright of every member of the 
 Catholic Church. We are not concerned here with 
 theology or philosophy, and we may therefore note 
 without further comment that, as a matter of fact, 
 whatever its explanation, the prestige of that august 
 conception of human destiny had become, in the 
 opening years of the nineteenth century, very dim. 
 Voltaire was not a final solvent of the claims of 
 ecclesiastical authority, but, for the moment, he 
 was an exceedingly effective one. Disillusion 
 necessarily ensued, and it reached a depth of 
 which the height of Christian aspiration furnished 
 the measure.
 
 38 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 It is true that Merimee did not himself suffer the 
 personal disillusion of the loss of belief. But 
 generations of Christian heredity were behind him, 
 and there is no doubt that the close reserve and 
 impassivity of manner that made him resemble ' un 
 Anglais, sauf le sourire,' says Taine, were the mask 
 of a profoundly sensitive and emotional nature. 
 His voluminous correspondence with his 'amies' 
 reveals, as we shall see, an affectionate and tender 
 temperament at which he himself was the first to 
 mock. 
 
 Born into that clear dry air of rationalism, in 
 which propositions crackle defiantly like pistol 
 shots, his nature lacked the environment necessary 
 for emotional expansion. So his view of life came 
 to be based on a mistrust of emotional values, and 
 also, it must be added, of those intellectual general- 
 isations which many of them seem to imply. It 
 must further be noted that Merimee did not 
 replace any of the lost illusions. He was not of 
 those who believe the more ardently in humanity 
 when they have lost their faith in God, who find 
 their ideal on earth when Heaven has melted away. 
 No ; he lived contentedly, stoically at least, on the 
 fine edge of complete disillusion : 
 
 Veut-on savoir sa conception de la vie? II 1'enfermait 
 dans une farce profonde qu'il a re"p6t6e plusieurs fois dans 
 ses lettres. ' Arlequin tombait du cinquieme etage.
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 39 
 
 Comme il passait a la hauteur du troisieme, on lui demanda 
 comment il se trouvait.' ' Tres-bien, pourvu que cela 
 dure.' La vie est une chute. D'ou tombons-nous et ou 
 tombons-nous? On ne sait. Dans une seconde nous 
 aurons les reins cassis, mais on est si bien en 1'air ! 
 
 Complete detachment from any dogmatic belief 
 nay, the passionate rejection of any such mental 
 bonds has not infrequently been allied with a 
 highly sensitive religious temperament. Amiel is 
 a case in point ; he is, in fact, the prototype of such 
 souls. Me'rime'e was, it must be owned, openly 
 irreligious ' impie,' as the French say. Beyle, 
 who delighted in being called the ' personal enemy 
 of Providence/ had cultivated with complete success 
 the elements of irreligion which his disciple had 
 learnt, in the first instance, at his mother's knee. 
 His philosophy was the pure materialism of Holbach 
 and Helvetius ; there were no half-tones, the set- 
 ting sun had left no twilight behind. As the years 
 and he grew grey together, he came, in a measure, 
 to modify his attitude, although the fact that he 
 did so was unknown, save to one, until the year 
 1897, when Une Correspondance Ine'dite was pub- 
 lished in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 
 His correspondent in this series of letters was a 
 deeply religious woman, and Me'rime'e was much 
 attached to her. Her friendship brought out a side 
 of his nature, little suspected by the librarian
 
 40 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Panizzi and Mile. Jenny Dacquin, the recipient of 
 the first Lettres d une Inconnue. In these pages 
 we have a Merim^e who has made a careful study 
 of the Gospels, who regrets his conscientious 
 inability to accept Christianity, who can reach the 
 point of saying : ' Dieu me semble tres probable, et 
 le commencement de 1'Iivangile de Saint Jean n'a 
 rien qui me r6pugne. ' But, so far as we know, except 
 for the clause in his will directing prayers to be 
 said at his grave by a Protestant minister, which 
 looks suspiciously like a last stroke aimed at the 
 religion of his country, or may have been perhaps 
 a courteous concession to the feelings of the two 
 devoted English ladies who nursed him on his 
 deathbed, these velltitts of belief never reached 
 the consistency of a permanent mood or translated 
 themselves into action. 
 
 Merimee's literary contribution at first sight 
 seems rather the product of the leisure of an 
 accomplished man of the world than that of a pro- 
 fessional man of letters. An accomplished man of 
 the world he certainly was, wearing his immense 
 learning with unobtrusive grace, willing to devote 
 his time and erudition to making a success of 
 country-house theatricals, devoted to little girls and 
 cats, between which branches of the animal kingdom 
 he maintained the existence of a mysterious affinity, 
 a delightful companion, attractive as it would seem
 
 PROSPER MRIME 41 
 
 by a singular dispensation, to men and women and 
 children alike he was all this, but he was more 
 also. He possessed a very special and individual 
 view of art, which he was fortunate enough to be 
 able to express almost perfectly. Indeed, his style, 
 given his self-imposed limitations, is practically 
 perfect, the only possible criticism on it being that 
 the routine of its bland impeccability gives at times 
 the suggestion of something inhuman. Never to 
 make mistakes is surely to be more or less than 
 man. And, in truth, his view of life of which his 
 style is so perfect an equivalent here, if ever, le 
 style cest Fhomme was not that of one who is him- 
 self involved in its delicious and absurd complica- 
 tions, its foolish tragedies, its comedies of tears. 
 In his writings, if not in his life, he stands per- 
 manently aloof from the passions which he paints 
 so perfectly. Never for an instant is he betrayed s 
 into partisanship for any of his puppets. Jos 
 Lizarrabengoa and the Spanish gipsy, Arsene 
 Guillot and Mme. de Piennes, Julie de Chavarny, 
 Saint-Clair, the Abbe Aubain, Colomba, Don Juan 
 de Marana, types terrible, pathetic, humorous, flit 
 across his purified vision, which remains intent 
 only on noting the beauty of their ever-changing 
 combinations as they pass. His attitude is that of 
 the eternal spectator, of the God whom Mephisto- 
 pheles revealed to Doctor Faustus. That deity
 
 42 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 was no doubt immoral, and, from the human point 
 of view which judges deities, so far, unsatisfactory. 
 But to be an immoral God is the achievement of 
 the artist 
 
 Flaubert has left behind him his ideal of perfect 
 anonymity, of the entire self-suppression of the 
 writer in his creation. It was just this that Merimee 
 attained so supremely. 
 
 Take, for instance, the following passage from 
 that flawless piece of work, Carmen : 
 
 Elle avait un jupon rouge fort court qui laissait voir 
 des has de sole blancs avec plus d'un trou, et des souliers 
 mignons de maroquin rouge attaches avec des rubans 
 couleur de feu. Elle ecartait sa mantille afin de montrer 
 ses epaules et un gros bouquet de cassie qui sortait de sa 
 chemise. Elle avait encore une fleur de cassie dans le 
 coin de la bouche, et elle s'avangait en se balanc.ant sur 
 ses hanches comme une pouliche du haras de Cordoue. 
 Dans mon pays une femme en ce costume aurait oblige" 
 le monde a se signer. A Seville chacun lui adressait 
 quelque compliment gaillard sur sa tournure ; elle r6pon- 
 dait a chacun, faisant des yeux en coulisse, le poing sur 
 la hanche, effrontee comme une vraie bohemienne qu'elle 
 etait D'abord elle ne me plut pas, et je repris mon 
 ouvrage ; mais elle, suivant 1'usage des femmes et des 
 chats qui ne viennent pas quand on les appelle et qui 
 viennent quand on ne les appelle pas, s'arreta devant moi 
 et m'adressa la parole : ' Compere,' me dit-elle, a la fac,on 
 andalouse, ' veux-tu me donner ta chaine pour tenir les 
 clefs de mon coffre-fort ? ' C'est pour attacher mon pin- 
 glette,' lui repondis-je. ' Ton pinglette ! ' s'6cria-t-elle en 
 riant ' Ah, Monsieur fait de la dentelle, puisqu'il a besoin
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 43 
 
 d'e'pingles ! ' Tout le monde qui tait la se mit a rire, et 
 moi je me sentais rougir, et je ne pouvais trouver rien a 
 lui re"pondre. 'Aliens, mon cceur,' reprit-elle, 'fais-moi 
 sept aunes de dentelle noire pour une mantille, epinglier 
 de mon ame ! ' et, prenant la fleur de cassie qu'elle avait 
 a la bouche, elle me la lanc.a, d'un mouvement de pouce, 
 juste entre les deux yeux. Monsieur, cela me fit reflet 
 d'une balle qui m'arrivait. . . . Je ne savais ou me fourrer, 
 je demeurais immobile comme une planche. Quand elle 
 fut entree dans la manufacture, je vis la fleur de cassie 
 qui etait tombe"e a terre entre mes pieds ; je ne sais ce qui 
 me prit, mais je la ramassai sans que mes camarades s'en 
 apergussent et je la mis prcieusement dans ma veste. 
 Premiere sottise ! 
 
 What splendid objectivity of treatment is here ! 
 How grandly the scene moves towards its con- 
 clusion the treasuring of the flower from Carmen's 
 wilful red mouth and how deftly that conclusion 
 sums up, in a gesture of self-committal, the process 
 in the speaker's mind, never described, but thus 
 inevitably revealed. 
 
 Such revelation of character compressed into a 
 trait, fixed in a passing gesture, struck, as it were, 
 once for all, in the clear outline of an antique medal, 
 is the secret of his power of narrative. The daily 
 actions of human beings are in great measure dis- 
 tressingly irrelevant ; three parts of what we say 
 and do does not really belong to us it is more 
 external to us than our clothes, being but the half- 
 conscious reproduction in the mirror of the mind of
 
 44 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 what we see and hear around us. To discern amid 
 this baffling whirl of quasi-automatic reaction the 
 
 / really significant 'Word,' the authentic movement 
 of the conscious soul with all its most distant, most 
 secret implications, and so to express all this that 
 it reveal itself clearly, finally, with that inevitability 
 of phrase which is the only hall-mark of true literary 
 expression, is to be a great artist. Merimee's 
 reputation might well rest on this scene of the 
 meeting of Don Jose and Carmen. 
 
 Nothing is further from his mind than any general 
 philosophy of life. ' La metaphysique me plait,' he 
 writes to a correspondent, ' parceque cela ne finit 
 jamais.' He is content with the concrete episode 
 
 \/ and confines himself to tracing the psychological 
 connections of moods. In this way, however, he 
 becomes a philosopher, malgrt lui. Into the 
 hundred pages of Carmen has gone the whole of 
 Schopenhauer's metaphysic of Love and Death. 
 Arsene Guillot is worth many learned treatises on 
 popular religion and the psychology of the courtesan. 
 Very significant too is his choice of subject. He 
 seems not to have been much interested in those 
 
 V refinements and complications which increasing 
 civilisation has worked into the woof of our passions. 
 In this respect he and Mr. Henry James are at the 
 antipodes of art. His characters are all quite 
 simple, or at least their complexity does not go
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 45 
 
 beyond the barely-veiled cunning of the savage. 
 They are so dominated by the passion that leads 
 them up to the dramatic issue of the story as to 
 appear at times to be but embodiments of it. Not 
 that they ever become mere abstract types. They 
 are filled in with a wealth of detail, of plausible 
 circumstantiality which makes them breathe full- 
 blooded before us. Their hands grow hot or cold 
 in ours, as we meet them at some tragic parting of 
 their ways. 
 
 But everywhere and always they are puppets at 
 the mercy of fate, and the cords with which their 
 destiny at last strangles them, are twined out of 
 their own passionate, wilful hearts. Life is a force 
 a ' Force Ennemic ' which sweeps them on to the ^ 
 inevitable doom of human consciousness in such 
 conditions. 
 
 The tragic simplicity of his characters is matched 
 by the simplicity of the issues with which he prefers 
 to deal. Just as they are among the least intro- 
 spective of the great creations of fiction, so these 
 issues are of the plainest and most direct. Love, 
 jealousy, revenge, unchecked by philosophy or 
 religion, form the staple of his matter. There is 
 hardly one of his tales that does not involve more 
 than one violent death. Appropriately he chooses 
 his mise-en-scene among Andalusian gipsies, or in 
 the brigand-infested maquis of Corsica, or in wild
 
 46 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Lithuanian forests, where sorceresses dwell. The 
 naive immorality of his personages finds thus a 
 congruous setting. For, in truth, Merimee paints 
 pre-moral man before he had fully emerged from 
 the womb of his great Mother ' red in tooth and 
 claw.' 
 
 Of the subsequent process by which, in patient 
 length of centuries, reason developed with its 
 derivatives, religion and civilisation, of the slow, 
 gradual formation of other than purely egotistic 
 values, he has little, if anything, to say : these 
 things do not interest him, they do not possess the 
 dramatic quality which he seeks. Of the world of 
 inner tragedy of a Hamlet or a St. Augustine he 
 knows nothing. 
 
 One of his most powerful stories, Colomba, 
 possesses in a high degree this sombre beauty of a 
 humanity that we still feel stirring in the recesses 
 of our inherited being. 
 
 Colomba is a Corsican maiden who is a living 
 incarnation of the dominant passion of her island 
 race. The one duty of Corsicans is revenge. 
 They do not seem to have reached, at the begin- 
 ning of the nineteenth century, that stage of civil 
 development known as the law for composition of 
 blood. So strict is their devotion to duty that one 
 wonders how their bloodthirsty stock has survived. 
 They have come to take a disinterested pleasure in
 
 PROSPER MRIME 47 
 
 the performance of these sinister actions for their 
 own sake in virtue of a well-known law of social 
 development. One Pietri dies an exceptional and 
 natural death. His son exclaims at his father's 
 funeral : ' Oh, pourquoi n'es-tu pas mort de la 
 malemort (mala morte)? Nous t'aurions venge!' 
 And one feels his regret to be excusable, indeed 
 inevitable. 
 
 Colomba's father has been treacherously mur- 
 dered about a year before the opening of the story. 
 She suspects the hand of a rival family, the Barra- 
 cini, who are, however, able to exculpate themselves 
 legally. One may imagine how much value that 
 has in Colomba's eyes. So she sets to work aided 
 by two friendly brigands, who live concealed 
 latitanti, as Italians still say of their descendants 
 to-day in the jungle or maquis that covers more 
 than half the island, to weave the web of evidence. 
 She discovers a forgery here, there an altered date 
 in the documents on which the Barracini relied to 
 prove their innocence. Her case complete, she 
 hands over the sacred charge to her brother, an 
 officer in the French army. Ors' Anton, however, 
 has imbibed the prejudices of civilisation during a 
 prolonged residence on the Continent. He doubts 
 his sister's evidence, and, in any case, would be for 
 legal proceedings. A degenerate indeed ! 
 
 A un demi-mille du village, apr&s bien des detours,
 
 48 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Colomba s'arreta tout-a-coup dans un endroit ou le 
 chemin faisait un coude. La s'e"levait une petite pyramide 
 de branchages, les uns verts, les autres desse'che's, amon- 
 cele"s d la hauteur de trois pieds environ. Du sommet on 
 voyait percer I'extre'mite" d'une croix de bois peinte en 
 noir. Dans plusieurs cantons de la Corse, surtout dans 
 les montagnes, un usage extremement ancien, et qui se 
 rattache peut-etre a des superstitions du paganisme, 
 oblige les passants a jeter une pierre ou un rameau d'arbre, 
 sur le lieu ou un homme a pe"ri de mort violente. Pen- 
 dant de longues annees, aussi longtemps que le souvenir 
 de sa fin tragique demeure dans la me'moire des hommes, 
 cette offrande singuliere s'accumule de jour en jour. On 
 appelle cela 1'amas, le mucchio d'un tel. Colomba s'arreta 
 devant ce tas de feuillage, et arrachant une branche 
 d'arbousier 1'ajouta a la pyramide. 
 
 ' Orso,' dit-elle, 'c'est ici que notre pere est mort. Prions 
 pour son ame, mon frere ! ' et elle se mit a genoux. Orso 
 1'imita aussit6t. En ce moment la cloche du village tinta 
 lentement, car un homme e"tait mort dans la nuit. Orso 
 fondit en larmes. 
 
 Au bout de quelques minutes Colomba se leva, 1'ceil 
 sec, mais la figure animee. Elle fit du pouce a la hate le 
 signe de croix familier a ses compatriotes et qui accom- 
 pagne d'ordinaire leurs serments solennels ; puis, entral- 
 nant son frere, elle reprit le chemin du village. Us ren- 
 trerent en silence dans leur maison. Orso monta dans sa 
 chambre. Un instant apres Colomba 1'y suivit, portant 
 une petite cassette qu'elle posa sur la table. Elle 1'ouvrit 
 et en tira une chemise couverte de larges taches de sang. 
 
 ' Voici la chemise de votre pere, Orso,' et elle le jeta sur 
 ses genoux. 
 
 'Voici le plomb qui 1'a frappe",' et elle posa sur la 
 chemise deux balles oxyde"es. 
 
 ' Orso, mon frere ! ' cria-t-elle en se precipitant dans ses
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 49 
 
 bras et 1'etreignant avec force, ' Orso ! tu le vengeras ! ' et 
 elle 1'embrassa avec une espece de fureur, baisa les balles 
 et la chemise, et sortit de la chambre, laissant son frere 
 comme pe'trifie' sur sa chaise. 
 
 Colomba's designs are at last crowned with 
 success. After a meeting, for purposes of recon- 
 ciliation, with the Barracini (insisted on by the 
 preTet), at which they are convicted of perjury 
 and corruption on the evidence of a bandit, called 
 M. le Cur6, the two sons of the Barracini lie in 
 wait for Orso and attempt to assassinate him. He 
 kills them both in self-defence. The twelve-year- 
 old niece of the bandit, Chilina, carries the news to 
 Colomba and satisfies her of her brother's safety. 
 
 ' Les autres ! ' demanda Colomba d'une voix rauque. 
 Chillina fit le signe de la croix avec 1'index et le doigt du 
 milieu. Aussitot une vive rougeur succeda, sur la figure 
 de Colomba, a sa paleur mortelle. Elle jeta un regard 
 ardent sur la maison des Barracini, et dit en souriant a 
 ses hdtes : ' Rentrons prendre le cafeY 
 
 That ' Rentrons prendre le cafe ' is magnificent ! 
 
 The description of the procession bringing home 
 to their father, the bodies of the young Barracini is 
 like a piece of an antique frieze. 
 
 Le jour e"tait dej'a fort avance" lorsqu'une triste proces- 
 sion entra dans le village. On rapportait a 1'avocat 
 Barracini les cadavres de ses enfants, chacun couche" en 
 travers d'une mule que conduisait un paysan. Une foule 
 de clients et d'oisifs suivait le lugubre cortege. Avec 
 
 D
 
 50 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 eux on voyait les gendarmes qui arrivent toujours trop 
 tard, et 1'adjoint, qui levait les bras au ciel, re"pe"tant sans 
 cesse : ' Que dira M. le preTet ? ' Quelques femmes, 
 entre autres une nourrice d'Orlanduccio, s'arrachaient les 
 cheveux et poussaient des hurlements sauvages. Mais 
 leur douleur bruyante produisait moins d'impression que 
 le desespoir muet d'un personnage qui attirait tous les 
 regards. C'tait le malheureux pere, qui allait d'un 
 cadavre a 1'autre, soulevait leurs tetes, souille'es de terre, 
 baisait leurs levres violettes, soutenait leurs membres deja 
 roidis, comme pour leur eviter les cahots de la route. 
 Parfois on le voyait ouvrir la bouche pour parler, mais il 
 n'en sortait pas un cri, pas une parole. Toujours les yeux 
 fixe"s sur les cadavres, il se heurtait contre les pierres, 
 centre les arbres, contre tous les obstacles qu'il rencon- 
 trait. 
 
 And with this we will take leave of Colomba, 
 among the most sombre and tragic of Merimee's 
 creations. In constructing this type of primitive 
 humanity, at once so terrifying and so beautiful, he 
 returned to the primal sources of Art, for Primus 
 in orbe deos fecit timor. 
 
 Merimee was more than a writer of stories, 
 though it is undoubtedly by them that he will live. 
 He composed several volumes of history, published 
 some admirable archaeological studies the fruits 
 of his labours as Inspector of National Monuments 
 and wrote several plays. He 'commenced 
 author' as a dramatist with his Cromwell, which 
 Stendhal praised highly. He followed this up 
 with his imaginary The"dtre de Clara Gazul. This
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 51 
 
 volume contained several short dramas, of which 
 the two best are Les Espagnols en Danemark and 
 Le del et L'Enfer, professing on the title-page to 
 be a translation of the work of one Clara Gazul, 
 'la celebre comedienne espagnole.' Such literary 
 tricks were much in fashion in those days. Pro- 
 bably no one was deceived, more particularly as 
 the frontispiece displayed, as the portrait of the 
 supposed authoress, a caricature of Merimee him- 
 self in a low dress by his friend Etienne Delecluze. 
 Nevertheless, the cleverness of the postiche was 
 such that a Spaniard was reported to have said : 
 ' Yes, the translation is not bad ; but what would 
 you say if you knew the original ? ' He used his 
 talent for mystification still more cleverly in the La 
 Guzla, which was given to the world as a collection 
 of Dalmatian ballads. He has told us the circum- 
 stances in a preface written in 1840. Local colour 
 was the Holy Grail of the young Romantics. But 
 how paint local colour without travel, and how 
 travel without money ? Merimee quotes the recipe 
 which he gave to his friend J.-J. Ampere : 
 
 Racontons notre voyage, imprimons-en le r6cit, et avec 
 la somme que cette publication nous rapportera nous irons 
 voir si le pays ressemble a nos descriptions. 
 
 Merimee invented a bard of the name of Mag- 
 lanovich, whose ballads he professed to translate.
 
 52 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 He added numerous pseudo-philological notes, a 
 pedantic dissertation on Vampires and the Evil 
 Eye, and a plausible biography of the bard. This 
 time the success was complete. Pouchkine, the 
 Russian poet, was completely taken in, and trans- 
 lated several pieces as curious specimens of the 
 Illyrian genius. Merimee sums up the episode in 
 a very characteristic conclusion : ' a partir de ce 
 jour je fus degout6 de la couleur locale, en voyant 
 combien il est aise de la fabriquer.' When local 
 colour fails, what remains for the sceptical 
 Romantic ? 
 
 We have seen how MerimeVs scepticism affected 
 his art, influencing him in his choice of subject, 
 driving him back from the problems of civilisation 
 to the more spontaneous interplay of passion and 
 impulse in a less sophisticated humanity, driving 
 him outward from the study of the soul to the 
 observation of fact. That collective process of 
 reason which we call civilisation was a snare useful 
 for impressing the bourgeois ; equally the individual 
 process which we call a human character was with- 
 out intrinsic interest, and derived its value for art 
 from the casual combinations into which it might 
 enter with others on the stage of time. And in all 
 this he was a disciple of Stendhal. But he was a 
 disciple with a difference. 
 
 Stendhal, in spite of his genius, could never tell
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 53 
 
 a story, and his style he never revised was both 
 clumsy and careless. Mrim6e could not write a 
 really bad sentence, and was one of the best 
 raconteurs that ever lived. To the philosophy of 
 Stendhal, which remained substantially his own, 
 he brought a much more strictly disciplined intelli- 
 gence, and, in spite of his deliberate cynicism, a 
 high degree of that indefinable quality called nobility 
 of heart. The lives of the two men, as well as 
 their literary productions, afford evidence of this. 
 The ideas of Stendhal, for instance, in the matter 
 of love were so well known that the authorship of 
 Casanova's Memoirs was for a short time plausibly 
 attributed to him, and it may fairly be doubted 
 whether he would have been in the least inclined 
 to resist the impeachment of having been the hero 
 of any of the adventures of that egregious Venetian. 
 Merimee was also all his life an homme afemmes, 
 but he was of too fine a make to find satisfaction 
 in the embraces of the Venus of the coulisse or the 
 carrefour. He was no saint, as the phrase is ; but 
 he knew that there are at least fifty thousand ways 
 of enjoying the society of women, and he was cap- 
 able of pity and self-control. 
 
 J'allais etre amoureux (he writes to an unknown cor- 
 respondent) quand je suis parti pour 1'Espagne. La 
 personne qui a cause" mon voyage n'en a jamais rien su. Si 
 j'etais rest,j'aurais peut-etre fait une grande sottise, celle
 
 54 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 d'offrir a une fern me digne de tout le bonheur dont on 
 peut jouir sur la terre, de lui offrir dis-je, en ^change de 
 la perte de toutes ces choses qui lui 6taient cheres, une 
 tendresse que je sentais moi-meme tres inferieure au 
 sacrifice qu'elle aurait peut-etre fait. 
 
 Not all those who proclaim loudly a more romantic 
 view of the matter would be capable of such gener- 
 ous delicacy. 
 
 The more intimate side of Merimee's nature, 
 studiously concealed in his fiction, appears clearly 
 enough in his correspondence. It is a fascinating 
 compound of tenderness and mistrust, of sensitive 
 pride at times overthrown by an irresistible need of 
 emotional expansion and the spontaneous aban- 
 donment of a deeply affectionate nature. Much 
 of his sentimental life is rightly buried for ever. 
 The devotional scruples of his mistress brusquely 
 cut short his first liaison. His second lasted 
 eighteen years the average length of a French 
 government, says M. Filon. This too came to an 
 end, not on account of scruples, but because the 
 beloved grew cold. Merimee suffered horribly. 
 ' Mes souvenirs meme ne me restent plus,' he 
 writes to a friend. He puzzles his head over the 
 reasons for his mistress's change. ' Un remords 
 peut-etre, mais je suis presque sur qu'il n'y a pas de 
 pretre dans 1'affaire.' Ah! his enemy was Time, 
 the one eternal priest who, sooner or later, washes
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 55 
 
 away our loves and hates, our sins and our virtues 
 alike. He himself had not been in this affair quite 
 beyond reproach. The correspondence with Mile. 
 Jenny Dacquin must have been carried on, at least 
 in part, coincidently. This voluminous sheaf of 
 letters, published in 1874 under the title Lettres a 
 une Inconnue, reveals in Me*rimee a somewhat 
 exigeant but truly devoted lover, and, in his corre- 
 spondent, a singularly tiresome mistress. Their 
 characters were too much alike for them to be 
 happy. She was too much of a Merim6e en femme. 
 Both had the same fear of the open sea, and pre- 
 ferred hugging the shores of their respective 
 egotisms ; and his shore was lined with bristling 
 rocks and dangerous shoals. 
 
 1 Le bonheur lui manquait,' says Taine. If 
 happiness failed him, it was not for lack of those 
 external conditions which are usually held sufficient 
 to produce it. He was rich, popular, successful ; 
 but happiness is a subjective quality, and there was 
 that in his nature which made him his own worst 
 enemy. He could never let himself go. He was 
 always more afraid of error than anxious for truth. 
 This constant fear of deception led him perhaps 
 into the greatest of all. For, in life, he was by no 
 means all that he might have been, and, in Art, his 
 place, though certainly of the highest, is narrow.
 
 56 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 WHEN Gibbon delicately pointed his remarks on 
 the 'immorality' of the clergy during the dark 
 ages, with the reflection that it was, after all, the 
 virtues rather than the vices of that body which 
 were dangerous to society, he went far to redeem 
 himself, by anticipation, from the charge of super- 
 ficiality fastened on him by the great ecclesiastical 
 advocate of our day. 
 
 At least, he thereby indicated his opinion that 
 so vast a topic as the social effects of Christianity 
 could not be fruitfully discussed on such a side- 
 issue as the moral defects which priests may 
 happen to share with their untonsured brethren. 
 And although this may appear to-day a very 
 obvious commonplace, it represented in the 
 eighteenth century the century of Condorcet 
 and Voltaire a degree of philosophic calm on 
 the subject which too many philosophers failed 
 to reach. ' Les philosophes du iSeme siecle, 
 trop disposes a croire que I'homme est toujours 
 et partout le mme, se figuraient volontiers les
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 57 
 
 ap6tres comme des capucins fripons.' Yes, but 
 apostles are not always and everywhere rogues, 
 and the implication hardly became the men who 
 were so anxious, in their turn, to try their hands at 
 the regeneration of society. It is to be feared that 
 even now, in our cultured midst, prepossessions of 
 the same nature as those which dominated these 
 powerful but one-sided thinkers are not altogether 
 dead. They still flourish, for instance, in what 
 Viscount Morley once amiably called the dregs 
 of the ecclesiastical world, and, for that matter, 
 of the anti-ecclesiastical world also. Nay, even 
 for those who aim at the not so common virtue 
 of intellectual integrity, it is by no means easy in 
 the particular case to be sure of objective vision, 
 of 'seeing the object as it really is,' for, it is 
 hardly possible that our view of the social effects 
 of Christianity should be unaffected by our view of 
 Christianity itself. And that attitude is so largely 
 determined, as one of the greatest and saddest of 
 human geniuses has told us, by reasons of the heart 
 of which the reason knows nothing. 
 
 Attempts in the direction of such inquiry have 
 frequently been made, both by the defenders 
 and the opponents of Christianity. And in this 
 circumstance, perhaps, lies the secret of their 
 inconclusiveness. For the offices of judge and 
 advocate cannot be confused without detriment
 
 58 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 to the verdict. Reference has already been made 
 to the bigotry prevailing among the French anti- 
 Christian thinkers of the eighteenth century. They 
 did but take their cue from the defenders of 
 orthodoxy. In England too, such hostile critics 
 as Collins and Tindal were hardly more acrimoni- 
 ous and foul-mouthed, than a Christian bishop like 
 Warburton. 
 
 Like modern scientific psychology, which has 
 devoted itself to carrying out the programme 
 indicated by Taine in the memorable words : 
 ' C'est a Tame que le science va se prendre,' 
 the nineteenth-century novel occupied itself with 
 a close scrutiny of the soul of man, so close indeed 
 as sometimes to forget its artistic purpose, relapsing 
 now and again into the pure science which was 
 the backbone of its method. A literature based 
 on Taine's programme, and guided by an insatiable 
 curiosity to seek the precise measure of every 
 ascertainable aspect of the contemporary soul, 
 could not fail, sooner or later, to find itself 
 confronted by religion. 
 
 The way in which man worships the gods is 
 surely at least as important as the way in which 
 he loves ; and we know, to satiety, the value 
 attributed by modern masters of the novel to 
 the latter propensity. Apart, moreover, from the 
 psychology of the individual, religion in its public
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 59 
 
 aspect is a form of social life, and, in that capacity 
 also, challenges the criticism of the modern novelist. 
 
 o 
 
 Thus it seems to have come about that, under the 
 influence of a spirit essentially non-religious and 
 non-metaphysical, a spirit, that is, which, by 
 hypothesis, abstains from absolute conclusions as 
 much as from preconceived ideas, a possible 
 method has been found for a fruitful criticism of 
 the religious phenomenon. We cannot derive any 
 precise information about religion in mid-Victorian 
 England or the France of the Second Empire 
 from the most careful study of the Book of 
 Common Prayer or the Catechism of the Council 
 of Trent, but 'le petit fait bien choisi,' Trollope's 
 vignettes of the Barsetshire clergy, or Fabre's 
 studies of ecclesiastical life in contemporary 
 France, can tell us a great deal on the subject. 
 The indirect method of such criticism is also 
 largely in favour of its results, for it reduces to a 
 minimum, what may be called the friction of the 
 critic's personality. 
 
 ' Had I written an epic about clergymen,' says 
 Trollope, ' I would have taken St. Paul for my 
 model; but, describing, as I have endeavoured to 
 do, such clergymen as I see around me, I could 
 not venture to be transcendental.' That is to say 
 that Trollope writes of the clergy as they happen 
 to occur in the society in which he finds them ; they
 
 60 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 are described from outside as social phenomena, not 
 from within as spiritual forces. It were impossible 
 to consider the matter from a sounder point of view 
 for the purpose in hand. 
 
 Now the Church of England in Trollope's day 
 showed to great advantage by this method of 
 portraiture. Many of the country clergy were 
 men of good family, not a few of them reaching 
 a far higher standard of education than was 
 common at that time among the English upper 
 class. They were also generally men of high 
 moral character ; in short they fulfilled admirably, 
 on the whole, the purposes for which an established 
 Church may be supposed to exist in the idea of a 
 broad-minded statesman. The village spires of 
 England pointed to an ideal in harmony with the 
 best actual elements of the nation's life. 
 
 The Church may have been, in Lord Beaconsfield's 
 phrase, still reeling from the effects of Newman's 
 secession, but the shock had not made itself felt 
 much in the country cathedral chapters, nor had the 
 backwash of the Tractarian movement as yet settled 
 itself into the current of modern Anglo-Catholicism. 
 The Anglicanism of Barchester stood serene and 
 strong in the consciousness of possession, not only 
 of the spiritual values demanded and appreciated 
 by the consciences of the faithful, but of those 
 earthly values also, which, in their secular accumu-
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 61 
 
 lations, had fairly come to represent, as in fact they 
 had originally expressed, the appreciation of the 
 faithful. 
 
 The Church of England stood in those days, 
 for a fact ; was indeed itself a great representa- 
 tive fact, to wit, the people of England from 
 a religious standpoint. To those old-fashioned 
 divines, whose blameless lives Trollope paints so 
 delightfully, religion was no matter of idea at 
 all, it stood or fell as a fact, compact indeed of 
 venerable precedent and present dignity of circum- 
 stance, but still as solid and undeniable as the 
 fabric of the cathedral in which they preached. 
 As such they preached it, and as such their hearers 
 accepted or declined it. This may not have been 
 a transcendental attitude, but there was philosophy 
 in it too. 
 
 Take the scene of the bishop's death in the 
 opening chapter of Barchester Towers which is 
 one of truly fine comedy, in Mr. Meredith's sense 
 of the word. It is also an English, an Anglican 
 scene. Nowhere else on the face of the earth 
 could such a scene have occurred just like that. 
 Archdeacon Grantley ' certainly did desire to play 
 first fiddle ; he did desire to sit in full lawn sleeves 
 among the peers of the realm,' and he did desire, if 
 the truth must be out, to be called ' My Lord ' by 
 his reverend brethren. Innocent ambitions after
 
 62 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 all ! And ambitions not differing in kind from 
 those of all professional men, as Trollope in the 
 same chapter remarks. Very different was the 
 ambition of Hildebrand. Here we may observe 
 an authentic note of the Church of England of 
 that day. The psychological characteristics, the 
 faults and virtues of the clergy were those belong- 
 ing not essentially to a priesthood but rather to all 
 men indifferently. The moral eminence on which 
 the clergyman stood his ordination vows and 
 Sunday preaching made a background against 
 which those characteristics were more clearly 
 visible than in the case of most men, but the 
 qualities themselves were common to all. The 
 fact is that the Christianity of Barchester Close, 
 in spite of its goodly array of dean, prebendaries, 
 minor canons and vicars-choral, was, in accordance 
 with the national temper of mind, emphatically 
 non-sacerdotal. 
 
 The picture of the Church of England in 
 Trollope's pages represents that institution as 
 reflecting the best elements of the nation's life, 
 its wholesome morality, its respect for law and 
 order, its love of justice combined with a singular 
 inability to recognise a concrete case of injustice 
 when sanctified by tradition. It must be admitted 
 also that certain other elements are not wanting. 
 An heroic impenetrability to ideas, a loathing of
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 63 
 
 change, a pride of place and circumstance that is 
 not always according to reason. But, on the 
 whole, it is a great picture of a noble spiritual 
 fabric which like our 'glorious constitution,' of 
 which it is a part, a special aspect, points to no 
 individual founder, stands for no special idea, 
 but has come to be what it is through its own 
 spontaneous development as representative of the 
 nation's spiritual attitude, modified by, and in 
 turn reacting on, the secular elements of the 
 nation's growth. 
 
 It is a far cry from the gray, peaceful, rook- 
 haunted towers of Barchester to the French 
 cathedral town of Lormieres ; as far as from 
 the methods and the point of view of Anthony 
 Trollope to those of Ferdinand Fabre. This 
 powerful writer, though little known in England, 
 was one of the most important minor novelists 
 of the Second Empire. Indeed, one can only 
 call him minor in reference to his narrow range 
 of subject (he specialised in priests) and his 
 relatively small output. Sainte-Beuve praised his 
 work in the highest terms. He just missed his 
 fauteuil through the theological animosities created 
 by his novels. Some of the Immortals voted 
 against him because his writings were anti- 
 religious, and some because they were too clerical. 
 Pasteur was among his opponents on the former
 
 64 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 ground. His personal views (if he had any) were 
 never revealed by him to any one. There is a 
 tale of an indiscreet journalist who, in the course 
 of interviewing his widow, asked her point-blank 
 what her husband's religious beliefs had been. 
 He could get no answer but a silent smile. His 
 youth at least was religious. Like Renan, he 
 was a seminarist who discovered before it was 
 too late that he had no vocation. And he cer- 
 tainly retained from his training, as did Renan, 
 a good deal of the priest. He handles problems 
 of conduct with professional delicacy of touch, 
 with a true moral sympathy, and yet, from the 
 point of view of one who himself stands outside 
 the web of sorrow and passion in which weaker 
 ones are entangled. You feel that he touches such 
 cases tenderly, compassionately, like a physician 
 of the soul. His sympathy also for those of his 
 characters in whom the ecclesiastical type of virtue 
 is fully developed, is clear enough. Not that 
 this sympathy ever blurs his vision. In Les 
 Courbezons, one of his most admirably executed 
 characters, a miracle of Christian charity and pure- 
 hearted devotion, creates misery all around him 
 through his inability to practise such elementary 
 virtues as foresight and thrift The man's admira- 
 tion for the qualities he describes so well does not 
 prevent the artist seeing through and beyond them.
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 65 
 
 It was partly his inability to interest himself iri 
 the personages of the modern novel, combined 
 with the accidental circumstance of his ecclesi- 
 astical training, that led Fabre to his chosen 
 subject. 
 
 1 Assurement ces personnages, le mari, la 
 femme et 1'amant, qui deTraient le roman contem- 
 porain, qui le deTraieront peut-tre toujours, car 
 les combinaisons entre ces trois facteurs sont 
 imperissables comme la vie elle-meme, offraient 
 un interet tres vif. Mais comment arrivait-il que 
 ces combinaisons, tantot ingdnieuses, tantot puis- 
 santes, me laissaient froid ? . . . Dans 1'Eglise au 
 contraire j'tais saisi, touchd tout de suite. II 
 n'tait pas un detail du bnitier au tabernacle, 
 dans la domaine des choses, du plus humble des- 
 servant au souverain pontife, dans la domaine des 
 hommes, qui empreint pour moi de quelque sou- 
 venir suave ou terrible, ne me remuat tete et 
 cceur.' From the point of view of modern litera- 
 ture the Church means the Priest; on the priest 
 then Fabre concentrated his powers of observa- 
 tion and description. 
 
 That mysterious figure, the foster-father of 
 civilisation and, in turn, its bitterest enemy, is 
 indeed of a nature to interest the psychological 
 inquirer. A man and yet not a man, for he is 
 both more and less than a man, the Catholic priest 
 
 E
 
 66 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 is the true descendant of all the medicine-men 
 and soothsayers of the past, as he is the most 
 complete and finished expression of the idea 
 which they all more or less successfully incarnated. 
 That idea briefly comes to this : that the unknown 
 force of the universe, the source of life from which 
 we come and to which after our brief wandering 
 we must return, being animated by an intelligence 
 and will akin to the human, can be approached by 
 us in our own interests, more humano. A priest- 
 hood exists in order to regulate and assure the 
 success of our commerce with the Divine Un- 
 known. 
 
 Some God or specially inspired prophet has 
 established the conditions of the compact between 
 men and the Divine, and priests are the appointed 
 channel by which the graces of the covenant are 
 secured to us. Outside their ministrations (says 
 each priesthood in turn) all is uncertain. Such 
 or something like it, is the idea on which every 
 priesthood has been based. In addition to this 
 the Catholic priest has the perfectly distinct value 
 of the Christian moralist, and it is the possession 
 of this ethical quality, in addition to the common 
 ground of all priesthoods, that gives its special 
 note, we may add, its special vigour to the hier- 
 archy of the Church. For those who are suscep- 
 tible to the attraction of a positive religion,
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 67 
 
 who are possible clients of a priesthood, may be 
 roughly divided into two classes. There are 
 those who are most interested in the idea under- 
 lying all priesthoods, namely the notion of some 
 certain channel of communication with the un- 
 known. Such as these will thrill with atavistic 
 terrors at the thought of death ; they have perhaps 
 done much that they would have undone, and they 
 feel that no natural force exists which can do that 
 for them. The claim of the Catholic priest to do 
 just this definitely, positively to forgive their sins 
 at a given moment, and thereby ultimately secure 
 them from the terrors of the grave, is exactly 
 what they want. They do not feel any great 
 interest in the moral or spiritual process implied, 
 still they wind themselves up to it under their 
 confessor's direction, as a necessary condition of 
 what they must have. There are others who are 
 primarily drawn to the ideal life of the Church. 
 Rightly or wrongly they think that that life is the 
 exclusive possession of the Catholic religion. To 
 secure those elements of peace and holiness they 
 are quite willing to fulfil the conditions of member- 
 ship imposed. So they accept without much 
 thought, or any particular interest in the points 
 involved, the thaumaturgic side of the system. 
 Thus the net of the Kingdom of Heaven takes 
 fish of more than one sort.
 
 68 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 If the Catholic priest were merely a priest he 
 would not appeal to these more spiritually-minded 
 clients; if he were merely a moralist he would 
 have no power over the superstitious sin-stricken 
 multitude. As it is, he has the power of holding 
 them both. In order to do this, however, he 
 must do more than advance his claim ; he must 
 present himself plausibly in both his capacities. 
 To achieve their combination in one individual 
 an altogether special system of education is neces- 
 sary, which inevitably results in the formation of 
 a very special and peculiar character. It is this 
 priestly character which is the subject of Fabre's 
 studies, whether he lingers with the country curds 
 in the Cevennes, among priests of the Lord who 
 heal the physical ailments of horse and man, as in 
 the Courbezons and Mon Oncle Ctlestin, or guides 
 us through the intricacies of the conflict between 
 Rome backed by the religious congregations and 
 the remnants of Gallicanism as in Lucifer, or 
 depicts the terrific shapes which egotism and envy 
 take on in the narrow and darkened soul of an 
 ambitious cleric as in L ' Abbt Tigrane. 
 
 It is a character which fascinates and repels. 
 The narrowness which is the condition of its 
 strength makes it hard of comprehension by the 
 modern world. This fact does not in the least 
 disconcert the priest ' Dieu a maudit le monde,
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 69 
 
 nous n'avons qu'un devoir stricte envers lui, c'est 
 de le sauver,' says the Superior of the Capuchins 
 in L'Abbe" Tigrane. 
 
 This is no pulpit rhetoric, it represents the sober 
 and permanent conviction of the ecclesiastical con- 
 science, the true 'power behind the Pope.' It is, 
 moreover, the correct deduction from the prin- 
 ciples on which that conscience has been formed. 
 From the age of fourteen the future priest is 
 trained in the monastic seclusion of the seminary. 
 That training is of course primarily theological ; 
 but theology alone will not fit him for his career as 
 a fisher of men. He must have some notion of 
 history, for history is a part of apologetics ; he 
 must know some natural science, for we live in 
 the days of the professor ; he must at least have 
 a smattering of philosophy, for Kant and Hegel 
 require periodic refutation. None of these things 
 indeed need he know for their own sake. Every- 
 thing must be done Ad majorem Dei Gloriam, and 
 the glory of God is the triumph of the Church. In 
 the ordinary life of men in the ' world/ the ideal 
 motive is intermittent. It intervenes in the play 
 of passion and impulse to correct, to guide, to 
 modify ; nor is this state of things without justi- 
 fication. Vauvenargues says that we perhaps owe 
 the greatest advantages of the spirit to our 
 passions, and that, without them, man would
 
 70 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 never have learned the lesson of reason. Far 
 otherwise is the ecclesiastical view based on a 
 scholastic realism which considers reason and 
 passion not as psychological products, as resultants 
 of the interplay of consciousness and environment, 
 as complementary factors, to be allowed their full 
 value in the construction of character, but as 
 objective entities really existing in the terms of 
 their definitions and necessarily at perpetual war. 
 Hence it comes about that, in the case of the 
 priest, the action of the ideal motive is incessant, 
 omnipresent, all-devouring. Sometimes of course 
 a terrific reaction ensues. Sometimes the strings 
 screwed up to their top note will snap. When 
 this happens, when the priest 'falls,' great indeed 
 is his fall. He is unlikely to stop in his down- 
 ward course at the average moral or immoral level 
 of the mere man of the world. 
 
 The positive elements of the seminary training 
 are reinforced and intensified by the negative. 
 The young Levite is kept in as complete seclusion 
 as possible throughout the whole period of his 
 education. The result is that he grows up in 
 complete ignorance of the real life of men and 
 women in the world. He has no conception of the 
 existence of any ethical system whatever except 
 the one in which he has been trained. All those 
 then who do not acknowledge the claims of
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 71 
 
 that system are necessarily without real morality. 
 Matthew Arnold has told us in one of his most 
 charming essays, of the account of the religion of 
 Paganism which he found in the Abbe" Migne's Dic- 
 tionnaire des Origines du Christianisme. ' Pagan- 
 ism invented a mob of divinities with the most 
 hateful character, and attributed to them the most 
 monstrous and abominable crimes. It personified 
 in them drunkenness, incest, kidnapping, adultery, 
 sensuality, knavery, cruelty and rage . . . what 
 must naturally have been the state of morals 
 under the influence of such a religion, which pene- 
 trated with its own spirit the public life, the family 
 life, and the individual life of antiquity.' Scarcely 
 less wide of the mark is the only view of the 
 world around him possible to the average semin- 
 arist. What can the noblest aspirations of modern 
 life be to him ? Mere delir amenta. What can he 
 think of the passion of liberty when he has been 
 taught to believe that all ethic is founded on the 
 basic virtue of minute and rigid obedience to 
 authority? What he thinks of the desire for 
 justice, so ineradicable an element of the modern 
 conscience, the last few years of French history 
 have proved us ad nauseam. 
 
 Thus armed with weapons which, if they were 
 adapted for the purpose in hand, he would lack the 
 strength to wield, he emerges at the age of twenty-
 
 72 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 four to do battle with a world which, even in the 
 countries in which he stands without serious rivals 
 as the representative of the religious principle, 
 needs the stimulus of an electoral crisis seriously 
 to advert to his existence. He soon finds that 
 the sword which flashed so bravely in the mimic 
 warfare of seminary dialectics, snaps in his hand 
 like a stage-property when employed on the 
 actualities of life ; that men have grown hopelessly 
 suspicious of 
 
 The old-world cures they half believe 
 For woes they wholly understand. 
 
 Then one of two things happens. If he be a 
 man of naturally indolent character he retires into 
 his presbytery as a snail into his shell. Those 
 who want him can seek him out. He knows that 
 the world is all wrong. ' Totus mundus in maligno 
 positus est,' says the Apostle, but he lacks the 
 strength and perseverance to keep on crying the 
 melancholy fact into deaf ears in the market-place. 
 To what end indeed ? No one listens to him. 
 Not for nothing has he put off the 'old man' of 
 his secular garments and been clothed in the 
 angelica vestis of the ' new.' He has lost his old, 
 his human self, and has put on the abstract person- 
 ality of the Church, and it is just that personality 
 that the world will have none of. He finds himself
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 73 
 
 in the position of having constantly to prove his 
 existence as a preliminary to the securing of a 
 hearing. And the position is an unpleasant, an 
 intolerable one. So he gives it up and retires 
 to lay mines according to his ability. On the other 
 hand, a man of really strong character, whose 
 virility has not been sapped by his training, is stung 
 by his painful position into the extreme of com- 
 bativeness. The celestial war-cry : Quis ut Deus / 
 rings in his ears. God's victory cannot be doubt- 
 ful and God's victory is the Church's and the 
 Church's is his own. In this way we reach the 
 type of the Abbe" Tigrane. 
 
 This great man is undoubtedly the most impor- 
 tant of Fabre's ecclesiastical creations. Vividly as 
 the others are painted, they pale before his fires. 
 He glows with the flamboyant colours of an Hilde- 
 brand or an Innocent in., and, in happier days, his 
 career would doubtless have been such as theirs. 
 As it is we take leave of him an Archbishop, still 
 in the prime of his life, discussing with his faithful 
 Vicar-General his chances of the Cardinalate and 
 the Papacy. 
 
 The Abb6 Ruffin Capdepont, nicknamed by his 
 companions in the seminary Abbe Tigrane on 
 account of his irritability, is one of the high officials 
 of the diocese of Lormieres which is governed 
 at the time the story opens by the aristocratic,
 
 74 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 generous-minded Mgr. de Roquebrun. This pre- 
 late has also his weaknesses of temper which do 
 not make easier his relations with his Superieur 
 du Grand Seminaire. 
 
 Capdepont hates the bishop, who has, he con- 
 ceives, robbed him of the diocese of Lormieres. 
 Nolo Episcopari was never his motto, and he had 
 so dwelt on the chances of his appointment to the 
 see that when Mgr. Roquebrun was chosen for the 
 mitre he felt it was a personal and unforgiveable 
 insult 
 
 ' On ne sait pas assez chez les laiques ce qu'est 
 1'episcopat pour un pretre. Hier vous etiez simple 
 soldat dans une arm6e de quatre-vingt mille 
 hommes (il y a environ quatre-vingt mille ecclsi- 
 astiques en France), aujourd'hui vous passez tout 
 d'un coup general. La transition n'est pas plus 
 menagee que cela. Le desservant, le cure-doyen, 
 le chanoine, le grand-vicaire possedent les memes 
 droits canoniques restreints ; 1'eveque seul possede 
 le sacerdoce dans sa plenitude. Et puis quelle 
 situation autre dans le monde! vous etes prince 
 de la Sainte Eglise Romaine, on vous appelle 
 " Monseigneur," le pape ne vous nomme plus que 
 " Venerable Frere," s'il veut prononcer une decision 
 relative a la reTorme du dogme ou de la discipline 
 il ne peut le faire sans vous ; (L'Abbt Tigrane 
 was written before 1870) vous allez a Rome, ad
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 75 
 
 limina apostolorum, comme on dit, et Ton vous 
 reQoit au Vatican avec la haute distinction accorded 
 aux souverains. Qui sait si maintenant que vous 
 avez la mitre d'eVeque, vous n'obtiendrez pas plus 
 tard la barette de Cardinal ? Qui sait meme si, 
 par le fait des revolutions dont nos temps ne sont 
 pas avares, vous ne coifferez pas un jour la tiare ? 
 Urbain iv. n'etait-il pas le fils d'un savetier de 
 Troye? Jean xxn. n'avait-il pas vu le jour a 
 Cahors ? ' 
 
 It must not be supposed that the Superieur du 
 Grand Seminaire is represented as a 'bad priest.' 
 Far from it ; his morals are above suspicion ; ' Je 
 fus toujours chaste ! ' he exclaims one day, in a 
 moment of expansion to his confidant 1'Abbe Mical. 
 He has but one passion ambition. 
 
 ' Zelus domus tuce comedit me!' His zeal for 
 the glory of God's house has turned into a mon- 
 strous, despotic egotism. God must conquer ; who 
 so fit to win the Church's battle as himself? But, 
 to win that battle, he must have a free hand, he 
 must have power, ever more and more power. He, 
 at last, comes in his monomania to identify himself 
 with his cause, or rather his cause with himself. 
 He can only see the triumph of God in his own 
 exaltation. So he is led, on the occasion of Mgr. 
 de Roquebrun's funeral, into a moment of real 
 insanity, when, to the horror even of his own sup-
 
 76 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 porters, he snatches at the episcopal ring on the 
 hand of the deceased prelate, whom he insults in 
 death by refusing admission to his body into his 
 own cathedral. The critics took exception to this 
 terrible scene on the ground of caricature. Fabre 
 replied that the Abbe Tigrane was no fictitious 
 character, and that he had not dared to give the 
 real facts of the case as they had come to his know- 
 ledge precisely for fear of that criticism. The 
 original Tigrane had left the Bishop's remains, not 
 in the Cathedral square, but in the episcopal 
 stables ! 
 
 It is needless to say that Tigrane aspired to 
 succeed the Bishop, and such was his ability that 
 he did so. His enemies did not fail to inform the 
 Vatican of his scandalous behaviour, but in vain. 
 
 No one, of course, supposes Fabre least of all 
 that Tigrane is the average priest. He is typical 
 in a very different sense to that. All strong-minded 
 men of action are inclined to be ambitious, and 
 their ambition may, as likely as not, assume a 
 form which is profitable to society. In Tigrane we 
 see an extreme instance of the ravages of ambition 
 in the ecclesiastical soul. And precisely that form 
 of ambition is essentially a priestly vice or virtue. 
 Its peculiar quality as well as its intensity comes 
 from the identification by the priest of himself with 
 the Highest, of his own egotism with the transcen-
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 77 
 
 dental egotism of the Church. It is in the fact 
 that no one but he is in the position to make that 
 identification, that the unique quality of the priest's 
 ambition consists, while its peculiar intensity is due 
 to the concentration of his professional ideal of all 
 that energy which, in the case of most men, is dis- 
 tributed over a variety of objects, together with the 
 narrowness of outlet which is the inevitable result 
 of his education. No one knew better than Fabre 
 that all priests are not ambitious, and, in his long 
 series of ecclesiastical portraits, he has shown us 
 not a few humble and zealous servants of humanity. 
 To them all honour. But he has shown us in 
 Tigrane a typical instance of what clerical ambition 
 means, and he also knew how liable priests are to 
 that particular vice. The drunken or incontinent 
 priest is the victim of faults common to all men. 
 Such a one pecca come uomo he sins as a man as 
 a dignitary once said to the present writer : Tigrane, 
 on the other hand, may be said to sin as Lucifer. 
 
 In reading these criticisms of the French and 
 English Churches one cannot but be struck by the 
 difference of the problems presented by either form 
 of Christianity. The anonymous forces which, by 
 their more or less constant equilibrium, have main- 
 tained the Church of England in existence, must 
 necessarily come under the influence of the Time- 
 spirit. Indeed, it is obvious that that spirit is what
 
 78 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 gives the Church its 'form,' as scholastics would 
 say ; while, on the other hand, the Catholic Church 
 anathematises, in Pius ix.'s Syllabus, those who 
 would be rash enough to maintain ' that the Roman 
 Pontiff can and ought to effect a reconciliation and 
 compromise with progress, liberalism, and modern 
 civilisation.' And though ecclesiastical authority 
 has at present a wary course to steer between the 
 achieved results of secular science and the positions 
 to which traditional theology stands committed, its 
 success is not by any means so uncertain as anti- 
 clericals like to think. For those positions by no 
 means always engage infallibility, and, even when 
 they do, the infallibility of a decree is one thing, 
 and its interpretation another. Interpretation may 
 well be progressive. This is not the place to discuss 
 the ecclesiastical future of Europe, but I may be 
 allowed at the close of this essay to indicate an 
 element of the discussion which too often fails to 
 obtain recognition. The real life of the Catholic 
 Church is its mystical life. The Church's politico- 
 ecclesiastical appearance shifts and changes, it is 
 the work of men not, as a rule, distinguished above 
 their fellows for intelligence or spiritual quality, and 
 often conspicuously below them. To suppose that 
 the life of the Church depends on anything they 
 can say or do would be a grotesque inversion of 
 things. The sources of the Church's life are not
 
 FERDINAND FABRE 79 
 
 to be found in consistories or any conceivable 
 priestly conciliabule, but are deep in the semi- 
 conscious soul of the civilisation at whose birth she 
 was present and to whose development her assist- 
 ance has, up till our day, been necessary. Will 
 that assistance be always necessary ? or, to vary 
 the question, will those sources ever run dry ? He 
 would be a rash man who would answer.
 
 80 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 
 
 SIXTEEN years ago M. Jules Huret, the well-known 
 Parisian journalist, published an Enqudte sur 
 (Evolution LitUrairc. He interviewed some 
 thirty of the best-known novelists and men of 
 letters in France and gave their views to the 
 world without comment, save that involved in the 
 colloquial skill with which he gracefully delivered 
 them of their opinions. And he thus produced a 
 most interesting and important volume. Apart 
 from the literary value of the pot-pourri, its signifi- 
 cance was of the highest. For the writers inter- 
 viewed such was M. Huret's professional ability 
 did not hesitate to express themselves with in- 
 genuous candour on their own prospects and those 
 of their confreres. 
 
 On first reading one derived but a hopelessly 
 confused impression, but gradually, as the cloud of 
 stormy eloquence rose, one discerned two things on 
 which the writers interviewed seemed pretty well 
 agreed : That naturalism was dead, and that among 
 the jeunes, from whom something new was to be
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 81 
 
 expected, Huysmans, Remy de Gourmont, and 
 Maurice Barres had, in the vivid vernacular of the 
 French writing-table, quelque chose dans le ventre. 
 Sixteen years have passed, and Barres has left the 
 battles of letters for the repose of the Palais Bourbon 
 and the Academy, Remy de Gourmont has produced 
 several volumes of philosophical romance of a high 
 order, and continues to delight us twice a month in 
 the Mercure de France with his own strongly indi- 
 vidualised blend of Nietzsche and Renan, while 
 Huysmans has left us for ever within the last few 
 months. He entered into peace through the gate 
 of pain, of pain so intolerable that it will not bear 
 thinking of, but before the eyes of that lover of 
 exquisite sensation were veiled by his last unutter- 
 able anguish, he had accomplished his task. 
 
 Joris-Karl Huysmans, who was born in Paris of 
 Flemish descent, in 1848, commenced author as a 
 fervent disciple of Zola. He was one of the con- 
 tributors to the famous Soire'es de Medan with 
 Sac-a-dos, a masterpiece of ferocious irony, in which 
 the real distress of the patriotic conscript is not 
 caused by the heroic sufferings of war, but by an 
 unintermittent colic. The satire of the little tale is 
 Rabelaisian both in its intensity and the coarseness 
 of its detail, and its essential irony is enhanced by 
 its humbling and brutal verisimilitude. We cannot 
 doubt, as we lay it down, that this, or something 
 
 F
 
 82 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 like it is, in fact, what war means to most of the 
 obscure thousands who are sacrificed to its lurid 
 prestige and dubious benefits. I do not know 
 whether anarchists make use of Sac-a-dos for their 
 propaganda ; they certainly could not do better. 
 Les S&urs Vatard, published in 1879, and dedi- 
 cated to Zola by ' his fervent admirer and devoted 
 Friend,' is, however, the greatest work produced 
 by Huysmans, during what is called his naturalist 
 period. It is indeed one of the finest works pro- 
 duced by any of the writers of that school, and far 
 more faithful to the naturalist formula than Zola's 
 epic poems in prose. Huysmans understood 
 naturalism in the sense of Flaubert, who, in spite 
 of the romantic beauty of his expression, revealed 
 himself as the first and greatest of the naturalists 
 in Mme. B ovary. Huysmans indeed renounced, 
 whether unconsciously, or through deliberate reflec- 
 tion, Flaubert's search for beauty of expression, 
 seeking nothing but accuracy and fulness of pre- 
 sentation. This he achieves by means of an 
 amazing accumulation of physical detail, which 
 produces on the imagination almost the effect of an 
 actual experience. There is a description of a 
 Fair in Les Sceurs Vatard, which is one of the most 
 astonishing pieces of realistic writing ever com- 
 posed. As you read it the book fades before your 
 eyes : you are there, at Vincennes, you are burnt
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 83 
 
 by the sun, you are deafened by the shouts of 
 cheap-jacks, you eagerly elbow your way through 
 the steaming, struggling crowd to contemplate the 
 charms of the femme colosse and the sinister arts of 
 the serpent-charmer ; you are alternately touched 
 and mortified by the sentimental gaucheries of 
 Desiree Vatard, who clings after the manner of 
 her class to your arm, and when you lay the book 
 down, you feel the physical and mental fatigue 
 inseparable from such a way of passing the after- 
 noon. In this book Huysmans succeeds in trans- 
 ferring, by suggestion, sensorial impressions to the 
 imagination directly, with all the acute crudeness 
 of sheer physical contact. But this is not all. The 
 psychology of De"sir6e and Celine Vatard, the wise 
 and the foolish virgin, is presented carefully and 
 convincingly. Two years out of the lives of two 
 little Parisian work-girls, one of whom is tempera- 
 mentally chaste and the other the reverse, but both 
 of them bonnes filles, Celine the noceuse, with a 
 highly comical sense of her own dignity and her 
 soul of a poor little animal which, after all, asks 
 only to gratify its instincts ; Desiree, the virtuous, 
 with all the elements of ihejeune fille of bourgeois 
 romance, saved from her sister's troubles by a 
 natural modesty of blood, as primary and ineluct- 
 able a necessity of her being, as Celine's riotous 
 desires are of hers this is all the story. And yet
 
 84 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 on this narrow scene, within these sordid and trivial 
 limits, the whole of life seems to pass before us. 
 The ambitious generalisation, the pseudo-scientific 
 theorising of Zola, is wholly absent from the pages. 
 Every character in the pitiful little play from the 
 leading ladies to the merest super, to the strangers 
 one brushes in the street, is individualised, is given 
 his full value as a human unique, every episode is 
 made wholly concrete, the author not only never 
 once betrays any desire to explain things, but does 
 not even suggest the faintest personal interest in 
 his puppets. He is wholly absent from his crea- 
 tion, his pen seeming to react mechanically to the 
 stimulus of the spectacle. Flaubert's ideal of the 
 impersonality of the artist is attained, and the 
 effect is the most poignant imaginable. Just so, 
 we feel, would life appear to us if we saw it as 
 it really is, apart from the deforming mirage of 
 our egoistic passions. Just so would it appear, we 
 think, to some superhuman intelligence, some angel 
 or demi-urge who, freed from the limitations and 
 exigencies of sense perception, would be equally 
 emancipated from those torturing and delicious 
 derivatives of the senses, the imagination and the 
 emotions. But, after all, such a fantastic hypo- 
 thesis is unnecessary, it is just so that it appears to 
 the purified eye of the scientific observer 'from 
 hope and fear set free.'
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 85 
 
 Equally galling to the vital instinct and satis- 
 factory to the instinct of knowledge is A Vau 
 FEau. It is a short story of some fifteen thousand 
 words which details the miseries of a vieux cdliba- 
 taire in Paris. M. Folantin is a Government 
 employ 4 at ^60 a year; he is timid in temperament, 
 moderate in desires, but he possesses a plain, strong 
 intelligence which precludes the possibility of 
 contentment with the few poor illusions which his 
 pittance can buy. Once more, in this dreary little 
 tale, we are made to drink the bitter lees of 
 existence. The essential bitterness of the draught 
 is caused by the absolute futility of such lives as 
 M. Folantin's. And millions of such lives are 
 necessitated by the conditions of humanity. It is 
 not merely that all super - terrestrial hope, all 
 religious and metaphysical aspiration are banished 
 from such lives this if we accept science as our 
 only reliable guide, we must be prepared for it is 
 that such lives themselves are hopelessly mutilated. 
 It is, however, in the conviction of the nothingness, 
 the ntant of life, that Huysmans finds the real 
 tragedy of humanity. It is not merely that men 
 suffer the highest hope that ever irradiated man's 
 heart was based on the joyous acceptance of 
 suffering it is that neither suffering nor joy really 
 matter. The universe goes on its senseless way to 
 its purposeless end that is no conclusion for it
 
 86 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 never ends, or rather it ends but to re-commence . 
 blindly throwing up from the depths of the uncon- 
 scious, millions of conscious organisms, stamped as, 
 under the old regime, French criminals were 
 branded with a red-hot fleur de lys, with the ironic 
 insignia of an illusory royalty. Man waves his 
 stage sceptre with an inalienable sense of freedom 
 and power, and what happens ? That which was 
 irrevocably determined to happen when our solar 
 system was still but a nebula, but a faintly luminous 
 corona in the ether. And the irony of the situation 
 is raised to its highest, most sinister point when we 
 reflect that man's illusion is as surely determined as 
 his impotence. For what is ' man's place in the 
 universe ' ? For a few seconds the world reaches 
 the point of self-consciousness, and mirrors itself in 
 the passive contemplation of a human mind before 
 sinking again into the unconscious eternity on the 
 surface of which organic life itself is but a ripple. 
 Those minds are re-duplicated a millionfold, yet 
 each subsists but for a few moments while, sooner 
 or later, the conditions of the planet will no longer 
 permit the existence of any at all. 
 
 As the conditions of life burn lower the universe 
 will slowly turn from the enigmatic and redoubtable 
 experiment of self-consciousness, and the peace of 
 death will brood once more over unconscious 
 matter. Such is the world as known to naturalism,
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 87 
 
 and the contemplation of it as the only certitude 
 bred in Huysmans a dull despair. He exhaled his 
 hatred of life in that strange fantasy A Rebours. 
 Life is worthless indeed, but, for the privileged 
 few, there is art. Let us then abandon life and 
 live in an aristocratic dream of beauty, of beauty 
 created by our own brains and hands, for the so- 
 called beauty of nature is a delusion. The beauty 
 of nature lends directly or indirectly to the strength- 
 ening and enhancing of the vital instinct, and 
 therefore to the perpetuation of the iniquity of life. 
 Nature's appeal is so obviously in most cases to 
 the nerves rather than to the brain, hence the 
 success of the uneducated. Popular ' art ' follows 
 also the line of least resistance, there must be 
 something wrong even about Rembrandt, for such 
 hopeless people admire him. He might have 
 added that moonlight cannot really be beautiful 
 because it makes nurse-maids sentimental. 
 
 The further art can go from nature the better. 
 The artistic sensations that Huysmans preferred 
 were subtle, rare and complex. The Art that is 
 simple and majestic, the Art, for instance, that was 
 the product of the Greek mind, says nothing to 
 him. The neurotic hero, Des Esseintes, who has 
 retired to the hermitage of his villa to live a life of 
 delicate inversion, spends an hour or two dreaming 
 over his favourite books. His 'Index* is signifi-
 
 88 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 cant. Virgil is ' L'un des plus terribles cuistres, 
 Tun des plus sinistres raseurs que 1'antiquite ait 
 jamais produits.' Horace ' a des graces ele- 
 phantines.' Ovid and Tacitus bore him less than 
 other classical writers, but he is really at his ease 
 only with the Decadents. Lucan and Petronius 
 ravish him, particularly Petronius in his Satyricon. 
 At the end of the book Des Esseintes feels the 
 reminiscent sting of his early religious training and 
 cries aloud for Faith. The book closes with his 
 prayer : ' Seigneur, prenez pitie du chre"tien qui 
 doute, de 1'incredule qui voudrait croire, du forQat 
 de la vie qui s'embarque seul, dans la nuit sous un 
 firmament que n'6clairent plus les consolants fanaux 
 du vieil espoir ! ' This monograph on aesthetic 
 neurasthenia, as it might be called, contains some 
 of the finest passages Huysmans ever wrote. 
 Take the marvellous description of Gustave Mo- 
 reau's I* Apparition or Des Esseintes' terrific vision 
 of Scrofula, the secular scourge of human genera- 
 tions. Never have words been made to do so 
 much. A Rebours, opening with Des Esseintes' 
 rejection of life, and ending with his hysterical cry 
 for Faith, is the bridge connecting Huysmans' 
 first and second period ; his naturalism and his 
 mysticism. Yet this criticism, in order not to be 
 misleading, must be made more precise. In 
 method Huysmans remained an impenitent natural-
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 89 
 
 ist to the end. Whether he is writing of M. 
 Folantin's despairing hunt for a decent meal in the 
 restaurants of his quartier, or of the visions of St. 
 Lidwina of Schiedam, his methods are always the 
 same. He proceeds invariably by the accumulation 
 of physical details which build up, as it were, cell 
 by cell, the organic whole of the scene he is 
 evoking. The intensity of the evocation, when 
 complete, is due to the power with which the 
 details are made to live in themselves, and the skill 
 with which they are inter-related. He produces a 
 composition which lives in the apparently spon- 
 taneous unity of a concrete moment. For and in 
 an attempt to appreciate Huysmans, the point can- 
 not be too strongly made, he is always concerned 
 with the concrete episode, which is indeed what 
 gives him his place among the purest and greatest 
 of naturalistic Masters, affiliating him also, in no 
 uncertain way, to those other great naturalist 
 artists, the painters of his native land. The 
 technique of his imaginative perception is very 
 closely reminiscent of the methods of the Flemish 
 painters. The exquisite conscientiousness with 
 which his details are finished, his sense of colour, a 
 certain rich simplicity of order in his composition, 
 the constant recurrence of certain elements meals 
 almost taking the place in his pages of the white 
 horse with his red-coated rider in the pictures of
 
 90 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Wouvermans his sense for the sordid, the trivial, 
 are characteristics which surely indicate the artistic 
 family to which he belongs. 
 
 In discourse he is at his worst. The theological 
 and archaeological disquisitions which seem to be 
 interpolated, as indeed they are, in his later works, 
 have a merely informational value and that, I fancy, 
 not always of the soundest. Certainly his theology 
 sounds peculiar at times. Nor does their weakness 
 come from the inherent difficulty in taking up a 
 new subject in middle age : it comes from his 
 innate incapacity to express himself in the way of 
 discourse. His attempts at reasoning in Les Foules 
 de Lourdes, one of his latest works in which he 
 hotly defends the miraculous nature of that success- 
 ful watering-place, are those of a clever child who 
 constantly misses the point through his inability to 
 resist distractions. You feel too that he is aware 
 of his unconvincingness, and being unable, from the 
 nature of the case, to use his own methods, turns 
 in vain to bitterness and even, on occasion, to 
 personal abuse of those so unfortunate as not to 
 share his prepossessions, in order, as they say, to 
 help himself out. The same tendency is visible in 
 the didactic parts of En Route. 
 
 We have seen that there is no difference in 
 Huysmans' earlier and later methods, that his 
 change was not in manner but in content. In the
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 91 
 
 first pages of La-Bas, the volume which follows A 
 Rebours and precedes En Route., there occurs a 
 dialogue which throws a light on his new departure. 
 After Des Hermies has said that naturalism was 
 the incarnation of materialism in literature, the 
 glorification of democracy in art, so correct a 
 representation of bourgeois ideas, ' qu'il semble une 
 parole, issue de 1'accouplement de Lisa, la char- 
 cutiere du Ventre de Paris et de Homais,' Durtal 
 replies : ' Le materialisme me repugne tout autant 
 qu'a toi, mais ce n'est pas une raison pour nier les 
 inoubliables services que les naturalistes ont rendus 
 a 1'art, car, enfin, ce sont eux qui nous ont 
 de"barasss des inhumains fantoches du romantisme 
 et qui ont extrait la litterature d'une idealisme de 
 ganache et d'une inanition de vieille fille exaltee 
 par le celibat ! En somme, apres Balzac, ils ont 
 cr6 des etres visibles et palpables et ils les ont 
 mis en accord avec leurs alentours, ils ont aid6 au 
 deVeloppement de la langue commencee par les 
 romantiques ; ils ont connu le veritable rire et ont 
 parfois meme le don des larmes, enfin, ils n'ont pas 
 toujours et souleves par ce fanatisme de bassesse 
 dont tu paries/ 
 
 Des Hermies leaves and Durtal continues his 
 soliloquy, summing up his conclusions as follows : 
 ' II faudrait garder la veracit du document, la 
 precision du detail, la langue etoffee et nerveuse du
 
 92 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 re"alisme, mais il faudrait aussi se faire puisatier 
 d'ame et ne pas vouloir expliquer le mystere par 
 les maladies des sens ; le roman, si cela se pouvait, 
 devrait se deviser de lui-meme en deux parts, 
 neanmoins soudees ou plutot confondues, comme 
 elles le sont dans la vie, celle de Tame, celle du 
 corps, et s'occuper de leurs reactifs, de leurs 
 conflits, de leur entente. II faudrait, en un mot, 
 suivre la grande voie si profondement creuse"e par 
 Zola, mais il serait ndcessaire aussi de tracer en 
 1'air un chemin parallele, une autre route, d'atteindre 
 les en de$a et les apres, de faire, en un mot, un 
 naturalisme spiritualiste ; ce serait autrement fier, 
 autrement complet, autrement fort ! ' 
 
 Such is the artistic programme which Huysmans 
 attempted to carry out in his later period. As I 
 have said, he in no way wished to modify the 
 methods of his technique which remained essentially 
 naturalist ; he wished to enlarge the content of his 
 art, to widen the field of his observation. When 
 he speaks of tracing in the air a parallel line to 
 Zola's line of physical observation he makes indeed 
 a philosophical advance on his former position, for 
 sound philosophy recognises that experience needs 
 for its constitution a subject as well as an object, 
 from which it follows that a state of mind as such, 
 independently of its physical accompaniment, is as 
 truly a fact as a state of body. This step was no
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 93 
 
 doubt taken unconsciously, for there never was a 
 mind more radically incapable of any kind of 
 philosophic speculation than his. It is nevertheless 
 what constitutes the human interest of the work of 
 his later period. For that interest certainly cannot 
 be said to lie in his somewhat bizarre presentation 
 of Christian mythology, which he happened to find 
 ready to his hand, to be tortured and inverted by 
 the horrible maniacs whom he shows us in Ld-Bas, 
 to be enthusiastically, if somewhat uncritically, 
 glorified in En Route and his other distinctively 
 Catholic works. It lies surely in the recognition 
 of the mystery of human experience diffused 
 through these volumes, together with the sense of 
 pity of the human lot and of the supreme value of 
 love. For these emotions he found both adequate 
 expression and an adequate stimulus, in the symbols 
 of mediaeval mysticism. Nor was that expression 
 and that stimulus purely literary. As is known, the 
 road of Damascus, on which Durtal travels from 
 La-Bas to L'Oblat, was the path followed by his 
 creator. Whether Huysmans' interest in Catholi- 
 cism was due in the first instance to the exigencies 
 of his literary development or to the necessities of 
 his soul is an unprofitable subject of inquiry. It is 
 enough for the critic to note that his hand grew 
 subdued to what he worked in, and that the man 
 came to acquiesce, with the full fervour of intense
 
 94 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 conviction, in the doctrines of the writer. To 
 criticise the personal solution in which he at length 
 found peace would be foreign to the subject of this 
 essay, and obviously of the nature of an impertin- 
 ence. Nevertheless as there have been several, 
 and not of one camp only, who have openly 
 expressed their doubts of the sincerity of his 
 attitude, I cannot refrain from expressing the 
 opinion that never was there a more complete, a 
 more sincere conversion than that of Huysmans. 
 None of the psychological elements of such a 
 change were wanting to him. A disgust of 
 contemporary life and an invincible repulsion to its 
 ideals, together with an ardent attraction for the 
 naive beauty of the mediaeval soul, for the whole 
 domain of that wondrous ' fief of Art,' as he calls it, 
 which was the creation of the mediaeval Church 
 these were most prominent among the raisons de 
 cceur which prevailed with him. The mysterious 
 crystallisation of these elements into the definite 
 attitude of belief, is as necessarily beyond criticism 
 as any other vital phenomenon. So much may per- 
 haps be said without offence. When, however, we 
 turn to the literary expression of his convictions, we 
 are once more in the world of discourse, we have 
 once more before us matter for reasoned appreciation. 
 What cannot fail to strike any one at all familiar 
 with contemporary Catholic literature is that Huys-
 
 JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 95 
 
 mans' religious books fall into a category of their 
 own. The man submits to the discipline which is 
 to save his soul, the writer remains a free lance. 
 The distinctive Catholic literature of our day is 
 either apologetic or written for purposes of edifica- 
 tion. And the public which it is attempted to edify 
 must be confined entirely, one would think, to women 
 and children. Huysmans certainly did not try to 
 put himself in line with this class of book. And, as 
 regards apologetic, it must be admitted that so far 
 as he had it in mind at all, it was of a very different 
 kind to that which we associate with the subtle 
 disquisitions of philosophers, such as Laberthon- 
 niere and Leroy, or the quasi-socialist propaganda 
 of the Christian democrats. The social or philo- 
 sophical possibilities of present-day religion had 
 not the slightest interest for his mind which was 
 spellbound by the vision of the glorious past, le 
 moyen age dnorme et ddlicat. In fact he was a 
 medievalist before he was a Catholic. In La-Bas> 
 while still far from any mental state which could be 
 called faith, he is a firm believer in the super- 
 natural, in magic, black and white. He knows the 
 names of many demons and their functions in the 
 cosmic economy. Indeed it is matter of reproach 
 with him against the ecclesiastical authorities, that 
 they betray so languid an interest in demonology ; 
 are, in fact, as he fears, tainted with scepticism.
 
 96 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Why insist on trying to come to an understanding 
 with M. Clemenceau, when you are really dealing 
 with Azrael ? 
 
 Thus he resuscitates for us in his vibrant pages 
 that old world, and makes it live once more with 
 its fantastic hopes and fears, its heaven and hell, its 
 angels and saints and demons. He does more. 
 He resuscitates also its beauty. The guardians 
 of the heavenly city to-day are often too much 
 absorbed in the immediate exigencies of the Holy 
 War to care for the beauty of the streets of 
 Jerusalem. The service which Huysmans has 
 done in calling attention to the treasure of Art 
 which is the heritage of the Catholic Church is one 
 which should make the members of that Church his 
 debtors, and in any case, entitles him to the gratitude 
 of all lovers of the beautiful everywhere.
 
 MAETERLINCK 97 
 
 MAETERLINCK 
 
 AMONG contemporary masters of prose, no one, I 
 think, gives so unique an impression, no one ex- 
 hales so special a fragrance as Maeterlinck. Is 
 he a lyric poet? Is he a dramatist? Is he a 
 moralist? It is hard to say; indeed, he seems 
 to be all of these by turn, and, even, on occasion, 
 at once. 
 
 He has written many miniature dramas 
 4 Shakespeare for Marionettes,' he calls them him- 
 self some of which are the most poignant little 
 pieces imaginable, all drenched with the tears and 
 mystery of things ; fragments of life itself, we 
 think, as we read or watch them for the first time, 
 almost catching our breath at the naivete* of their 
 frankness, at their childlike ingenuousness. He 
 has signed pages of criticism, in their way in- 
 imitable ; although they do not contain much of 
 what is ordinarily understood by the term. His 
 essays on Emerson, Ruysbroeck, and Novalis 
 convey no personal impression whatever of those 
 great ones ; they deal with the pure idea, and 
 
 G
 
 98 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 barely advert to the human envelope. But then 
 the idea is made to thrill with a mystic person- 
 ality, more intense than any which could be 
 suggested by the greatest accumulation of circum- 
 stantial or merely casual detail. Such work is at 
 the opposite pole of the critical art to, say, Mr. 
 Gosse's admirable study of Coventry Patmore. 
 There, bit by bit, the human being is recon- 
 structed and presented to us with all the illusion 
 of a live-eyed portrait, as he was seen, loved and 
 hated by his contemporaries. It is just this 
 suggestion of familiarity, of personal knowledge, 
 so skilfully conveyed by the art of Mr. Gosse, 
 which is utterly lacking to the essays of Maeter- 
 linck. From his point of view, such treatment 
 would be worse than irrelevant : it would be 
 almost indecent. On that high tableland of the 
 spirit, against the background of those eternal 
 snows, the human gesture, which our flesh can- 
 not but love, would pathetically dwindle into a 
 grotesque and pitiful pantomime. 
 
 It is said that some of the most beautiful effects 
 of Corot's landscapes were produced by the 
 master at such a distance from the subject he 
 was painting that all detail was indistinguishable 
 to the eye. So Maeterlinck discerns the spiritual 
 values of a Novalis or a Ruysbroeck by altogether 
 overlooking their existence in time and space, and
 
 MAETERLINCK 99 
 
 concentrating his gaze on the light of the idea 
 which they at once conceal and manifest. For if, 
 to the winking eyes of most of us, that light is 
 only tolerable by being broken on the prism, as it 
 were, of the seer's personality, by being refracted 
 through the daily habit of his life and conversa- 
 tion, which thus reveals to us as much of it as 
 we can bear, all that to Maeterlinck does but con- 
 ceal what he is in search of. He prefers to look 
 straight at the sun. We, who are not eagles, suffer 
 in the effort to share his vision; and a darkness, 
 which we feel would reveal so much could we but 
 pierce it, is apt to descend on our straining gaze. 
 The same criticism applies to the other essays 
 on moral and spiritual subjects collected in the 
 same volume under the title of Le Trtsor des 
 Humbles. Here and there the clouds part, and 
 an astonishingly pure and lambent ray gladdens 
 us for a moment; we feel we never knew what 
 light was before, like those who for the first time 
 see the Italian sun ; then, once more, obscurity. 
 One thing, however, no conscientious student of 
 Maeterlinck can maintain ; and that is, that his 
 obscurity partakes in ever so slight a degree of a 
 pose, of a deliberate mystification. Here is no atti- 
 tude of indifference, no mask of intellectual scorn, 
 but rather the patient effort of a most unusual sin- 
 cerity which, with the obvious repression of a fine
 
 100 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 rhetorical gift, endeavours to express exactly what 
 is meant ; just that and nothing more. Such sin- 
 cerity inevitably appears a little forced and arti- 
 ficial to those who come to it fresh from the 
 comfortable atmosphere of polite human inter- 
 course. Professor Wallace attributes the difficulty 
 presented by Hegel's philosophy to a beginner, 
 to the contrast which it offers to our ordinary 
 habits of mind. ' Generally speaking, we rest 
 contented if we can get tolerably near our object, 
 and form a general picture of it to set before our- 
 selves. It might almost be said that we have never 
 thought of such a thing as being in earnest, either 
 with our words or with our thoughts.' Just such a 
 contrast exists between our habitual retailing, for 
 purposes of social currency, of our profoundest 
 and most intimate emotions, and Maeterlinck's 
 method of dealing with them. We cannot avoid 
 the prick, that if we were purer in heart, we 
 should understand him better. 
 
 It is proposed here to consider Maeterlinck as a 
 moralist. That the preoccupation of morals, of 
 the practical art of life, has always been with him, 
 is evident ; in his earliest work it is not absent, 
 but it has only disengaged itself and become fully 
 self-conscious in his latest writings, in La Sagesse 
 et la Destinde, Le Temple Ensveli, and Le Double 
 Jardin ; and it will be with these volumes that
 
 MAETERLINCK 101 
 
 we shall be here principally concerned. It may, 
 however, be well, before considering their con- 
 tents, to have clearly before us the state of mind 
 to which Maeterlinck addresses himself. The 
 condition of the hearer is always an important 
 part of the message he receives ; and this is 
 especially so when the teacher, as in the present 
 instance, is rather a master of suggestion than 
 of exposition. What then is the mental attitude 
 on this subject of his readers, so numerous and 
 appreciative that a new ' Maeterlinck ' has no 
 sooner appeared than it has flown in its thousands 
 over Europe ? 
 
 ' Nous sortons de la grande periode religieuse.' 
 That great change, gradually produced during the 
 last three hundred years in European opinion, 
 which has reduced theology from the position of 
 the Queen of the Sciences to the rank of an in- 
 dividual and private speculation, has had its re- 
 percussion in other departments of inquiry than 
 the theological. Indeed it would not be hard to 
 show that no branch whatever of human know- 
 ledge has remained unaffected by it. Based itself 
 in its origin on knowledge of a particular kind, 
 it has succeeded in extending its 'sphere of in- 
 fluence' over much which might seem foreign to 
 it. The discovery of Copernicus was more than 
 a celestial coup d*tat. It did more than over-
 
 102 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 throw man's sovereignty of the heavens ; it surely 
 numbered the days of Theocracy on earth. That 
 revolution of humanity on its own axis which 
 has produced the Arts, the State, Religion and 
 Morality, could not remain unaffected by it. Nor 
 has it done so. Slowly but surely, what is called 
 the scientific spirit has taken over every part of 
 human experience. 
 
 A phrase like 'the scientific spirit' is apt to 
 become a catchword. What precisely do we 
 mean by it ? Well, I suppose we mean the 
 habit of mind engendered by familiarity with the 
 method, even if not with the achievements, of 
 exact knowledge. It is not necessary, in order to 
 possess it, to know the secrets of the laboratory 
 or the test tube ; but we shall not gain it if we 
 do not understand the principle on which those 
 secrets are discovered. That principle is belief 
 in the unity and intelligibility in terms of related- 
 ness, of the whole phenomenal universe, from 
 which it results that a hypothesis has scientific 
 value, in proportion to its success in co-ordinating 
 the group of phenomena with which it deals, thus 
 tending towards that ideal unity, which it is the 
 aim of science as a whole to attain. The meta- 
 physician will tell us that this belief is a mere 
 assumption ; and so, in the terms of his art, it is. 
 But it is the assumption which underlies all possi-
 
 MAETERLINCK 103 
 
 bility of any knowledge which is to be more than 
 mere random and, occasionally, happy guess-work. 
 For science is no esoteric craft. The physiologist 
 or the chemist has no short cut to truth ; he uses 
 precisely the same faculties of perception and 
 ratiocination by means of which we all organise 
 a journey from Victoria to the Gare du Nord. 
 He uses them no doubt with far greater caution, 
 with an infinitely nicer sense of what is meant by 
 evidence, of the exigencies of demonstration, than 
 the layman ; but his instrument of investigation 
 differs only in degree of precision. It is an ill- 
 judged contempt that some people pour on popular 
 science ; if science were not, at least potentially, 
 popular, it would not be science at all. Of course, 
 pure, as distinguished from applied, science does 
 require certain special habits of trained attention 
 which are not at the command of all of us. But 
 the most advanced scientific experimentalist has 
 no other faculties to use in his investigations than 
 those which lie more or less idle in the brains of 
 all of us. Once stated, this is obvious ; but it is 
 by no means so universally appreciated as might be 
 thought. Many educated people talk of science as 
 if it were a special department of knowledge, or 
 one particular way of knowing things ; whereas, in 
 truth, the only real knowledge is scientific know- 
 ledge.
 
 104 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Another fallacy, common enough among the 
 laity, is to confuse the method of science in general 
 with the results of any particular science. Thus 
 the champions of intellectual reaction not infre- 
 quently argue from the errors which inevitably 
 attach to those results, to the discredit of the idea 
 of science itself. ' How little, after all, we know,' 
 they say, ' and how unreliable that little ! Science 
 shifts like the sand ; how can we take it seriously ? ' 
 These critics do not realise the distinction between 
 the method of science and its results in application. 
 They do not see that it is by clinging more and 
 more faithfully to that method, that the results are 
 gradually and progressively made perfect, that any 
 stage of investigation must, as such, be defective, 
 and finally that, however unreliable and scanty 
 scientific results at any moment may be, they repre- 
 sent at that moment the state of our knowledge 
 on that subject, and form themselves the point of 
 departure for further development. No one knew 
 better the defects of his hypothesis than Darwin ; 
 and it is just those defects that have been so fruit- 
 ful in the further development of his science. There 
 are many, however, and they are a daily increasing 
 number, who realise that, in the method of science, 
 man has discovered the true law of his knowledge ; 
 and it is they who dwell in the mental atmosphere 
 of the scientific spirit. This atmosphere it is,
 
 MAETERLINCK 105 
 
 rather than the negative arguments derivable from 
 any particular branch of science, that has produced 
 the effect on theological belief alluded to above ; 
 and it has produced it largely through the change 
 in the conception of truth which it implies. In 
 pre-scientific days, truth was any desirable opinion 
 which could not be disproved ; now the quality of 
 truth attaching to a statement is felt to be in exact 
 ratio to the evidence producible for it. 
 
 The weakening of theological belief has not been 
 without its effect upon morals. In the theological 
 period, by which I mean the period during which 
 theology was universally accepted by us Westerns 
 as the basis of human existence (controversy turn- 
 ing only on which was in fact the true theology), 
 morality was heteronomous, being based on the 
 will of God revealed to man ab extra. That it 
 possessed an intrinsic value was not denied except 
 by a few mystics ; but its mode of presentation was 
 authoritative or external, among Protestants and 
 Catholics alike. It was held that the conscience, 
 rightly directed and illuminated, would indeed 
 recognise the moral quality of the Divine law, but 
 that it would recognise it as such, rather than as 
 the externalisation of the immanent law of its own 
 being. Such recognition involved many non-moral 
 elements, such as particular judgments of fact that 
 this revelation and not another was the true one
 
 106 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 a philosophical judgment that Monotheism, 
 rather than Pantheism or Atheism, was the ultimate 
 truth of things. In proportion as the grounds for 
 either or both of these judgments were felt to give 
 way under critical analysis, the heteronomous 
 sanction of morality disappeared. To the minds of 
 many to-day, judgments of either kind appear not 
 so much erroneous as gratuitous and illegitimate ; 
 and it is to such, and such only, that Maeterlinck 
 addresses himself. 
 
 This emancipation of morality has seemed to 
 many a great and glorious thing ; and so it may 
 be. Nevertheless it cannot, I think, be denied 
 that the transition of the art of conduct from heter- 
 onomy to autonomy is attended with some danger 
 to the content of morality to our material if not 
 to our formal virtue. Many delicate readjustments 
 are required, if the passage from the service of God 
 to the service of man is to be effected without loss 
 by the way. The issue is not quite fairly put by 
 those who see in the doctrine of personal rewards 
 and punishments the sole value of the theological 
 sanction of human conduct. It was more, it was 
 other than merely this. That sanction amounted 
 to a popular and dramatic representation of the 
 belief that Man was, in fact, the most important 
 part of the universe, and his conscience the most 
 important part of Man. It implied that Man
 
 MAETERLINCK 107 
 
 touched the deepest reality in his conscience only : 
 the universe else was illusion. The triumph of 
 good in the long run was certain ; the victory of evil, 
 so palpable and evident, but a shadow that would 
 flee away at the moment of dayspring, when the 
 Sun of Righteousness would disperse the darkness 
 and consummate in the blaze of absolute justice the 
 drama of humanity. The Infinite was consciously 
 on the side of the human soul which was fashioned 
 in its image. 
 
 Now all this is changed. ' It is incomparably 
 more probable that the Invisible and the Infinite 
 intervene at every moment in our life under the 
 form of indifferent, enormous, blind elements, which 
 pass over and within us, penetrating, shaping and 
 animating us, without suspecting our existence, as 
 do water, fire, air and light. Now the whole of 
 our conscious life, all this life which constitutes our 
 one certitude and our one fixed point in time and 
 space, reposes in the last resort on incomparable 
 probabilities of the same order ; and it is rare that 
 they are so incomparable as these.' In these words 
 Maeterlinck resumes for us the moral sanction of 
 science. And yet, as he adds : ' The whole of our 
 moral organism is made to live in justice, as our 
 physical organism is made to live in the atmosphere 
 of our globe.' Thus a seemingly absolute dilemma 
 is created, in which what ought to be is at hopeless
 
 108 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 variance with what is. It is not merely that the 
 universe is not what we wish it were ; it is, and 
 this is very different, that it is not what we judge it 
 ought to be. 
 
 There are various ways of meeting this situation. 
 There is the way of heroic pessimism, which has 
 found a noble expression in the Buddhist rhap- 
 sodies of the French poet-philosopher Jean Lahor. 
 There is the attitude of mingled pity and irony 
 which we associate with the best work of Anatole 
 France. There is the immoralism of Nietzsche, 
 echoed by many thoughtless persons, who would 
 shudder at the self-discipline which it involves. 
 Maeterlinck takes none of these ways. It must be 
 confessed that he does not attempt any dogmatic 
 solution, nor does he even allude, in passing, to 
 those suggested by others. He is content to 
 observe directly, for himself, the moral phenomenon 
 with the grave, wide-eyed gaze of an inspired child. 
 In his two latest books, the metaphysical preoccu- 
 pations observable in his earlier work seem to have 
 dropped off him. Life, the actual tale of days of 
 men and women, working in fields and cities, in 
 courts and camps, at home and abroad, ' on perilous 
 seas forlorn,' has laid on him the fascination of its 
 touch. It is in this actuality, this nearness to 
 experience, that his value consists. He probes 
 into the moral fact as we find it in our common
 
 MAETERLINCK 109 
 
 human nature, unconcerned with its metaphysical 
 justification, and frankly admitting that our present 
 knowledge does not enable us demonstrably to 
 relate it to the rest of the Cosmos. Let us glance 
 at his method of treating Justice, at once the first 
 and the last of moral problems : 
 
 I speak for those who do not believe in the existence 
 of a Judge, unique, all-powerful and infallible, who, bend- 
 ing day and night over our thoughts, our sentiments, and 
 our actions, maintains justice in this world, and completes 
 it elsewhere. If there be no Judge, is there any justice in 
 existence other than that organised by men, not only by 
 their law and tribunals, but also in all social relations not 
 submitted to positive judgment, and having, as a rule, no 
 other sanction than that of opinion, the confidence or 
 mistrust, the approbation or disapproval, of those who 
 surround us? ... When we have deceived or got the 
 better of our neighbour, have we deceived and got the 
 better of all the forces of justice ? Is everything definitely 
 settled, and have we nothing more to fear? Or does 
 there exist a justice more serious and less liable to error, 
 less visible but more profound, more universal and more 
 powerful ? 
 
 Man feels with irresistible conviction the exist- 
 ence of such a justice. But where does it dwell if 
 the heavens be empty ? It is not an idle question, 
 for on the answer depends the whole of morality. 
 Of three men, the first of whom bases his morality 
 on the will of God, the second on a belief in some 
 sort of physical justice, the third simply on his per-
 
 110 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 sonal perception of justice, the third is the only one 
 who interests the moralist. In him alone is morality 
 really autonomous ; and he alone will survive the 
 other two. It is as certain as anything can be that 
 the source of justice is nowhere in the physical 
 universe around us. 'In the world in which we 
 live there is no physical justice proceeding from 
 moral causes, whether such justice be considered to 
 present itself under the form of heredity, illness, or 
 of atmospheric, geological, or any other phenomena 
 imaginable.' Maeterlinck analyses a few of our 
 more obvious illusions on the subject, and succeeds 
 in showing, what no one who has seriously con- 
 sidered the question can doubt, that Nature only 
 punishes breaches of physical law, with an entire 
 disregard of the moral quality of such breaches. 
 * There is within us a spirit which weighs only 
 intentions, there is without us a power which weighs 
 only actions.' The ' spirit which weighs only 
 intentions ' ; the source and only real sanction of 
 morality can, however, act on what is without, 
 modifying it to human ends, gradually substituting 
 the hut for the cave, evolving the social pact out of 
 the egotism of self-preservation, the family out of 
 the vagrant impulses of the promiscuous savage. 
 Thus a sort of physico-psychological justice is 
 brought about which, corresponding within the 
 sphere of phenomena subject to human action in a
 
 MAETERLINCK 111 
 
 manner roughly tolerable to our desires, makes it 
 possible for a moral creature to live without too 
 much discomfort in a non-moral universe. ' Nature ' 
 frequently upsets this reign of human law by 
 'accidents,' and, more often perhaps, by a certain 
 defect of comprehension, a certain slowness of 
 adaptation to human needs, which is, at times, 
 peculiarly exasperating. The idiotic volcano or 
 the stupid storm will, at any moment, still for ever 
 ' Shakespeare's brain or Lord Christ's heart.' Yet 
 not altogether ; and here Maeterlinck falls back on 
 a conception which it is difficult not to call mystical : 
 the conception of the dynamic unity of the universal 
 human soul. Whether or not ' mute inglorious 
 Mil tons ' lie in our churchyards, at least those who 
 sing, sing to all of us and for ever. The peasant 
 who passes has never heard of Plato; but had 
 Plato not thought in such and such a way, his own 
 thoughts would have been different. Wisdom, as 
 in the old Jewish book, reaches from end to end, 
 fortiter et suaviter disponens omnia. This fas- 
 cinating doctrine lies outside experimental verifica- 
 tion. It has a long history behind it ; echoes of it 
 come from the lecture halls of Alexandria and the 
 banks of the Ganges ; it seems implied in any 
 adequate view of the ' interior life/ And there will 
 always be those who will find in it the expression 
 of their latent conviction ; for it is one of the first,
 
 112 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 and not the least attractive, of the paths which open 
 before humanity on its homing quest if indeed it 
 be so back from the ' Many' to the ' One.' . . . 
 
 Apart, however, from such mysticism, Maeter- 
 linck finds a stimulus in the analysis of the con- 
 ditions of this man-made justice. Its reach is much 
 wider, and its effect much deeper, than is commonly 
 supposed. Here is a noble passage which cannot 
 be laid too much to heart : 
 
 We willingly place under the heading, ' Injustice of 
 the Universe,' a great number of injustices exclusively 
 human and infinitely more frequent and more murderous 
 than the tempest, illness and fire. I do not speak of 
 war ; it might be objected to me that it is attributed less 
 to Nature than to the will of peoples or princes. But 
 poverty, for instance, which we still place in the list of 
 irresponsible evils like the plague or shipwreck, poverty 
 with its crushing griefs and hereditary failures, how often 
 is it not imputable to the injustice of our social state 
 which is but the total of man's injustices ? Why at the 
 spectacle of an unmerited misery do we seek an heavenly 
 judge or an impenetrable cause, as if it were the affair of 
 a stroke of lightning? Do we forget that we find our- 
 selves here in the best known and surest part of our own 
 domain, and that it is we ourselves who organise misery 
 and distribute it as arbitrarily, from a moral point of 
 view, as the fire its ravages, or sickness its sufferings? 
 Is it reasonable for us to wonder at the ocean for not 
 taking account of the state of soul of its victim, when we, 
 who have a soul, that is to say the organ par excellence 
 of justice, pay no heed to the innocence of thousands of 
 poor wretches who are our victims ?
 
 MAETERLINCK 113 
 
 And to those who, with the ' complacent religi- 
 osity of the rich that execrable sentiment,' would 
 object that virtue and happiness are independent 
 of material conditions, he replies: 
 
 If the child of our good neighbour be born blind, 
 idiotic or deformed, we will go and seek, no matter 
 where, even in the darkness of a religion we no longer 
 practise, a God of some sort to interrogate his thought ; 
 but if the child be born poor, which usually lowers no 
 less than the most serious infirmity by several degrees 
 the destiny of a being, we shall not dream of asking a 
 single question of the God who is everywhere where we 
 are, since he is made of our will. Before desiring an 
 ideal judge, it is necessary to purify our ideas. Before 
 bewailing the indifference of Nature and seeking an 
 equity which is not there, it were wise to attack, in our 
 human regions, an iniquity which is there ; and when it 
 is there no longer, the part reserved for the injustices of 
 chance will probably appear reduced by two-thirds. It 
 will, in any case, be more diminished than if we had made 
 the storm reasonable, the volcano perspicacious, the ava- 
 lanche prewarned, heat and cold circumspect, sickness 
 judicious, the sea intelligent and attentive to our virtues 
 and secret intentions. There are, in fact, many more 
 paupers than victims of shipwreck or material accidents, 
 and many more maladies due to misery than to the 
 caprices of our organism or the hostility of the elements. 
 
 Truly a comfortable doctrine, a sound and godly 
 form of words. And woe to our ears if they are 
 too delicate to hear them ! 
 
 Of course this physico- psychological justice, 
 besides being, after all, limited in its range, is 
 
 H
 
 114 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 evidently imperfect in its nature from a moral 
 point of view. For though a moral intention is 
 essential to it, that intention alone will not produce 
 it. Power is required, and power in this case is 
 knowledge. Such knowledge is within the reach 
 of persons devoid of any morality. A despicable 
 character might quite well discover the secret of 
 what we call gravitation. And though the applica- 
 tion of such knowledge to human needs would be 
 materially moral, i.e. it would coincide with the 
 wider uniformities of human well-being, it might, 
 in the mind of its discoverer, be without any such 
 quality. It would then pass the objective test of 
 social morality ; but it would lack that subjective 
 sanction of conscious loyalty to ethical perception, 
 without which there is for man no real morality 
 whatever. The difficulty comes, not from the fact 
 that there is no morality in the universe, for man 
 is part of the universe and is moral ; but from the 
 fact that the power of the universe is not moral. 
 The maxim that knowledge is power may serve 
 well enough in the class-room ; and power of a 
 sort of course it is. But the power that is not 
 knowledge, that recks nothing of its effects, 
 envelops it as the ocean the drop of water. Ces 
 espaces infinies meffraient ! And well they may ; 
 for their profoundest depths in which lie the 
 destinies of all of us, are void of mind or conscience.
 
 MAETERLINCK 115 
 
 In his self-imposed task of the rationalisation and 
 moralisation of his experience, Man is alone and, 
 so far as he knows, unaided. On this point 
 Maeterlinck does not hesitate. He eschews com- 
 pletely the dialectical tours de force of liberalising 
 theologians. The Kingdom of Heaven, our natural 
 inheritance, is solely within us ; it exists only as 
 an ideal, only in relation to human appreciation 
 and discourse, that is, to our mind ; Justice, Mercy, 
 Beauty, Truth, are so many secretions of human 
 consciousness, as silk is of the silk-worm. 
 
 In the antinomy between man's sense of justice 
 and the indifference of the power which has brought 
 him forth, our modern pessimists find the essential 
 tragedy of humanity. 'A strange mystery it is,' 
 said Mr. Bertrand Russell in a remarkable article 
 published some years ago in the Independent 
 Review? ' that nature, omnipotent but blind, in 
 the revolutions of her secular hurryings through 
 the abyss of space, has brought forth, at last, 
 a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with 
 sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the 
 capacity of judging the works of his unthinking 
 mother.' 
 
 But is not such pessimism based rather on 
 mythology than fact ; is it not, after all, but an 
 after-effect of supernaturalism ? For Nature is 
 
 1 Independent Review, Dec. 1903, 'The Free Man's Worship.'
 
 116 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 no mother from whom we spring ; rather she comes 
 to birth in our brain. It is only under the action 
 of mind, and in relation thereto, that the term 
 acquires either unity or value. Nature as a term 
 of discourse, to which predicable values can be 
 assigned, exists only in the same purely ideal 
 manner as Truth, Beauty and Justice. The 
 generalisations by means of which we organise 
 what we call ' external,' are in our mind no less 
 ' ideal ' than those we employ in the construction 
 of moral values ; their locus is different, that is all. 
 The Ideal is as natural as the Natural is ideal. 
 It will nevertheless be said that, whether the 
 universe be the child of our brain or we its pro- 
 duct, makes no difference practically ; equally the 
 facts of experience are there, and we have to deal 
 with them. It is amid those facts, the determina- 
 tion of which is beyond our conscious control, that 
 our destiny is laid. Quite so ; and it is from what 
 is known of the human process, of the way in 
 which man has dealt with these facts, in the past, 
 that a sober and reasonable hope may be derived 
 for the future. In one of his finest essays, Les 
 Rameaux dOliviers, Maeterlinck states calmly his 
 grounds for such hope. His argument there is, 
 briefly, that such enormous difficulties, such terrible 
 dangers, are now overcome, that we need not 
 despair of the future. The law of man's progress
 
 MAETERLINCK 117 
 
 has been the growth of his knowledge of his 
 environment, which at first indeed appears hostile, 
 but which, at the magic touch of human will and 
 brain, shows itself more and more plastic. It is 
 as if Nature were coming gradually to recognise 
 her master, in proportion as that master enters by 
 degrees into the kingdom of reason implicit in his 
 consciousness. Man is, on the whole, wiser and 
 better ; civilisation, inadequate as its actual realisa- 
 tion may be, is, on the whole, more securely 
 established than ever before on the planet ; and 
 the vistas of knowledge open more widely, more 
 surely, more radiantly. If anything be needed to 
 turn the balance of abstract consideration, we are 
 justified in trusting to that indomitable courage, to 
 that unflagging resolution of the human will, to 
 realise by its creative power the ideals of the 
 spirit which has brought us so far on our long 
 pilgrimage. 
 
 I would venture to add a consideration which 
 Maeterlinck nowhere explicitly mentions, although 
 it seems to be implied in much that he says. By 
 hypothesis Man is no supernatural being fallen 
 from above into the universe. From the point of 
 view of science, he is the result of the forces that 
 at an earlier stage produced less complex manifesta- 
 tions of life. Does not this belief, instead of 
 making for pessimism, as so many seem to think,
 
 118 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 rather furnish a strong ground for hope ? If his 
 origin were supernatural, then indeed Man might 
 find himself at perpetual variance with his environ- 
 ment But if he is himself the product of that 
 environment, must not the equilibrium without 
 which he could neither have appeared nor have 
 maintained himself in existence come at length to 
 express itself in the harmony of his consciousness ? 
 Maeterlinck is certainly one of those who con- 
 tribute towards the grounds for thinking so, mainly 
 by the exquisite single-mindedness with which he 
 approaches the moral question, and which he in- 
 evitably communicates to a sympathetic reader. 
 Not perhaps, since Pascal, has a European thinker 
 vindicated so suggestively, so convincingly, the 
 true dignity of the human intellect, the moral 
 qualities inevitably inherent in the formation of 
 opinion. And it is with those great words of 
 Pascal, which so ^ptly resume the value of Maeter- 
 linck as a moralist, that I will bring this essay to 
 a close : ' All our dignity consists then in thought. 
 It is from thought that we should take our point 
 of departure, not from space or duration, which we 
 can in nowise fill. Let us therefore labour to 
 think correctly : that is the principle of morality.'
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 119 
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 ' THE longer I contemplate human life, the more I 
 believe that we must give it, for witnesses and 
 judges, Irony and Pity, even as the Egyptians 
 evoked over their dead the goddesses I sis and 
 Nephtis. Irony and Pity are two good counsellors. 
 The one smiles and makes life amiable ; the other 
 weeps and makes it sacred. The irony which I 
 invoke is not cruel. It mocks neither love nor 
 beauty. It is gentle and kind. Its laugh calms 
 anger ; and it teaches us to smile at wicked men 
 and fools whom, without it, we might have the 
 weakness to hate.' 
 
 These are the words of a wise man and of a 
 good man. They are, in addition, the profession 
 of faith of perhaps the first living writer of French 
 prose. M. Anatole France, the creator of Sylvestre 
 Bonnard, of the Abbe Jer6me Coignard, of M. 
 Bergeret, and of other charming companions of 
 the hours snatched from those dreamlike futilities 
 which make up what we call real life, is not only a 
 writer of fiction. I do not like to say that he is
 
 120 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 greater than that, lest, in the event of these lines 
 ever reaching the Master's eye, I should provoke a 
 certain quiet smile, which, envisaged in imagination 
 only, may well give the critic pause. At least I 
 may be permitted to say that he is more than that. 
 He is an historian of no common erudition ; he is 
 a poet ; he is a philosopher. 
 
 The last qualification may be disputed. Since 
 that birthday of philosophy on which our distant 
 ancestor first observed that all serpents had more 
 in common than of differentiation, philosophers 
 have disagreed, not only on the proper way to 
 conduct their business, but as to the precise nature 
 of the business itself. Mr. Webster tells us that 
 philosophy is ' the love of, including the search for, 
 wisdom ' : thus revealing, in a phrase, the paradox 
 at the core of every true philosopher's heart. For 
 he loves what he has not found, what, doubtless, no 
 man will ever find. He rises early and rests late, 
 and diligently sweeps his house, like the woman in 
 the parable ; but that precious penny still eludes 
 his subtlest search. The wisest are those who, 
 recognising this, find their account in so seemingly 
 untoward a circumstance. 
 
 It can hardly be doubted that if, in an ill-advised 
 moment, it were to occur to the high gods to repair 
 their blunders by admitting man to the comprehen- 
 sion of their eternal counsels, the day that they
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 121 
 
 did so would mark the beginning of the end of 
 humanity. Thought would cease, and man would 
 slowly begin with listless tread, to descend the 
 angel-guarded ladder of flame which reaches from 
 the earth of his origin to the heaven of his 
 aspiration. And the place of his alighting would 
 be no Bethel ; it would be the primitive hole on 
 the hillside, which, not so very long ago, he shared 
 with rat and wolf. For curiosity is the mother 
 of wisdom, last and most gratuitous, yet most 
 essential of man's inventions ; while life only 
 maintains itself in virtue of a constant effort to 
 surpass its achievement. Of these wisest philo- 
 sophers is the subject of this essay. 
 
 M. France is of the line of the great sceptics, the 
 salt of whose questionings has never been wanting 
 to freshen the stream of human speculation. Far 
 back that lineage stretches to legendary Pyrrho 
 and fabled Kapila, and doubtless far beyond them 
 again ; for Doubt and Thought are the twin 
 springs of the mind. The habit and aspect of the 
 sceptic vary from age to age. He has, as a 
 philosopher, no quarrel with the apparent values 
 of experience ; rather, with more than Protean 
 ingenuity, he welcomes them all in turn. Let the 
 banquet of life be as varied, as sumptuous, as 
 delicate as possible ; soon enough the cup must be 
 turned down and the garland doffed.
 
 122 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Yon rising Moon that looks for us again 
 How oft hereafter will she wax and wane ; 
 How oft hereafter, rising, look for us 
 Through this same garden and, for one, in vain ! 
 
 Meanwhile that moon shines on Rose-in-hand's 
 lips and eyes ; and the scent of the night is on her 
 hair and arms. Nor are these the only values of 
 life. In an attic of a dormer-roofed, seventeenth- 
 century Dutch house, sits a man still in the prime of 
 life. He has left both his tables, the one strewed 
 with manuscripts, the other with optical instru- 
 ments, to watch a spider's duel. To a close 
 observer, the brightness of his eye, the flush on his 
 cheek surely indicate the mortal disease which in a 
 year or two will cut him off. On the termination of 
 the fight he returns to his desk, and writes the 
 words : ' The free man thinks of nothing less than 
 of death.' The calm peace of his expression, 
 shining through the ravages of disease, shows that 
 his heart is set on the love of the Eternal, the 
 contemplation of which brings nothing but pure 
 joy. Again. In a ravine of the Umbrian high- 
 lands kneels a man, clothed in ash-coloured sack- 
 cloth. His eyes red with weeping, are fixed on a 
 roughly fashioned crucifix ; his hands clasped in 
 prayer, and his bare feet O miracle of love ! are 
 pierced and bedewed with blood. A wounded doe 
 lies close, with broken leg deftly bound up by the
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 123 
 
 Saint's art, watching her master with liquid eye. 
 She does not understand the meaning of his sighs 
 and tears, but, being fain to comfort him, pokes, 
 from time to time, a foolish tender muzzle among 
 the folds of his robe. The Saint turns with a 
 smile, and caresses his little friend ; and the blood, 
 which symbolises the ransom of mankind, stains 
 her white-starred forehead, innocent alike of sin 
 and redemption. Who shall estimate the rapture 
 of that man ? Also who, asks the sceptic, shall 
 determine, without fear of gainsaying, whether the 
 Persian reveller, Spinoza or St. Francis, be nearer 
 to the truth of things ? 
 
 Just as the sceptic looks with philosophic impar- 
 tiality on the differing manifestations of life con- 
 tained in the bosom of universal Nature, so also 
 there is nothing in his system to prevent his 
 adoption, for personal use, of such manifestations 
 as may seem to him especially worthy. 
 
 According as heredity, circumstances, personal 
 taste may dictate, he will be a voluptuary or an 
 ascetic, a reactionary or a revolutionary, irreligious 
 or devout. But in no case will he pay himself with 
 words. If, for instance, he be devout, he will not 
 attempt to sophisticate his mind or dim his soul 
 with the fancied pros and cons of the case : he 
 will frankly recognise his temperamental need of 
 religion, and boldly rest his faith on those reasons
 
 124 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 of the heart of which the reason is ignorant, and 
 which, however respectable as motives, are, in truth, 
 as he well knows, no reasons at all. Of M. France 
 it may be said that, though hardly to be called 
 devout, he has certainly engaged himself ' on the 
 side of the angels.' 
 
 Anatole Frangois Thibault (the name ' France ' 
 is a pseudonym) was born in Paris in 1844. 'It 
 seems to me impossible,' he says in his Livre de 
 Mon Ami, the charming autobiography of his 
 childhood, ' to have quite a commonplace mind if 
 one has been brought up on the quays of Paris, in 
 front of the Louvre and the Tuileries, near the 
 Palais Mazarin, in front of the glorious Seine, 
 flowing between the towers and turrets of old 
 Paris.' His father, M. Noel Thibault, a well- 
 known bibliophile, followed that most fascinating 
 pursuit, the second-hand book trade. He was no 
 ordinary bookseller, but employed his great know- 
 ledge in the collection of rare volumes. The talk 
 of his father's friends provided a literary atmosphere 
 for Anatole's childhood. Thus he learned the 
 elements of the religion of books which, even in its 
 fetichistic stage only, has consoled so many. His 
 mother, towards whom he practised that culte de la 
 ma mere which is so fine and general a note of the 
 French character, was a simple and devout person, 
 of warm heart and great good sense. It was her
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 125 
 
 love, no doubt, that fostered that intensely human 
 quality which was later to become so marked a 
 characteristic of M. France's work at his best. 
 Mme. Thibault would read saints' lives to the little 
 Anatole with, on one occasion, somewhat surprising 
 results. The episode is related in the Livre de 
 Mon Ami. 
 
 My mother used often to read to me the Lives of the 
 Saints, to which I listened with delight, and which filled 
 my soul with surprise and love. I knew now how the 
 men of the Lord managed to make their lives precious 
 and full of merit ; I knew the celestial fragrance diffused 
 by the roses of martyrdom. But martyrdom was an 
 extremity on which I did not decide. Nor did I dwell 
 on the apostolate or on preaching which were hardly 
 within my reach. I confined myself to austerities as 
 being both easy and sure. In order to abandon myself 
 to them without delay, I refused to eat my breakfast. 
 My mother, who did not at all understand my new 
 vocation, thought I was ill, and looked at me with an 
 uneasiness which distressed me. But none the less I 
 continued to fast. Then, recollecting St. Simon Stylites, 
 who lived on the top of a column, I climbed on to the 
 kitchen pump ; but I could not live there, because Julia, 
 the servant, promptly took me down. Having descended 
 from my pump, I ardently rushed forward on the road of 
 perfection and determined to imitate St. Nicholas of 
 Patras, who distributed his riches to the poor. The 
 window of my father's study overlooked the quay. I 
 threw out of his window a dozen coppers which had been 
 given me because they were new and shining; then I 
 hurled out my marbles and tops and my big peg top with 
 its eel-skin whip.
 
 126 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 ' This child is idiotic ! ' exclaimed my father, shutting 
 the window. I experienced anger and shame at hearing 
 myself judged in this way. But I reflected that my 
 father, not being a saint like myself, would not share with 
 me in the glory of the blessed ; and this thought was a 
 great consolation to me. 
 
 St. Theresa's childish dreams of martyrdom were 
 shattered by contact with reality in the shape of a 
 Philistine uncle. Anatole France's youthful aspira- 
 tions after sanctity he told his mother that he 
 longed to write after his name Ermite et Saint du 
 Calendrier, in emulation of the honorific suffixes 
 which took so much room on his father's visiting 
 cards were dissolved by the even pressure, as one 
 might say, by the force of inertia of the kindly 
 irresponsive domestic atmosphere. Sanctity as a 
 career was a failure ; but the child was too 
 thoroughly imbued with the national passion for 
 ' la gloire ' not to seek some other means of self- 
 illustration. After all his unregenerate father, 
 though heaven was closed to him, enjoyed much 
 respect, and could write any number of ' soul- 
 enhancing' epithets after his name. Perhaps his 
 interests might furnish materials for a career. So 
 the future Academician came to conceive his first 
 literary project : that of writing a history of France 
 in fifty volumes. At the moment of this resolution 
 he was still of tender years, so tender, in fact, that
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 127 
 
 he would weep when his nurse attended to such 
 elementary details of his toilet as his nose. More- 
 over, he could not read. But, as he had already 
 intuitively divined, material difficulties or even 
 impossibilities do not operate in the same order of 
 things as the idea. It may be well to add that 
 these fifty volumes have never existed save sub 
 specie aeternitatis. If space permitted, I could 
 linger much longer over this charming book, 
 written in the perfection of M. France's style, in 
 the maturity of his genius ; it was published in 
 1885. It is an unusually happy specimen of the 
 genre Confessions. The fresh ingenuousness of its 
 manner is rare enough in autobiography. 
 
 As he grew older, his father sent him to the 
 well-known College Stanislaus. Here that taste 
 for Greek and Roman antiquity, which has through 
 life meant so much to him, declared itself unmistak- 
 ably. He was fascinated by Sophocles and Virgil. 
 Not altogether, however, in a way agreeable to his 
 professors. The boy was a dreamer, and loved to 
 wander down those bypaths of scholarship which 
 do not lead to success in examinations. He tells 
 us that his 'Latin prose contained solecisms.' 
 Another cause of his unpopularity with his teachers 
 was his strongly marked inclination to elude the 
 religious discipline which was so accentuated a 
 feature of Mgr. Dupanloup's educational system.
 
 128 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 As he said at Treguier, of Renan, his mind realised 
 very quickly the difficulties of belief. Or rather, 
 perhaps, his imaginative outlook was filled up and 
 contented by the great figures of classical antiquity 
 in a way which left no void for religion to fill. 
 He says, to quote once more from the Livre 
 de Mon Ami : 
 
 I saw Thetis, rising like a white cloud over the sea. 
 I saw Nausicaa and her companions, and the palm-tree 
 of Delos, and the sky and the earth, and the ocean, and 
 Andromache smiling through her tears. ... I understood. 
 I felt It was impossible for me for six months to put 
 down the Odyssey. 
 
 The ancient gods had forestalled their successor ; 
 Anatole France as a child was anima naturaliter 
 pagana. 
 
 M. France commenced author with a small 
 volume of verse called Vers Dorts, under the 
 aegis of Leconte de Lisle. But the orthodoxy 
 of Parnassus soon became too strait for him ; and 
 the great man does not seem to have taken in 
 good part the heresies and, at last, the complete 
 defection of his brilliant but too individualist 
 disciple. Poetry, however, of which he has always 
 remained an ardent lover and penetrating critic, 
 was not to him a really authentic means of self- 
 expression. He had the faculty of writing verse, 
 as most great literary artists have ; but prose was
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 129 
 
 the medium most fitted for his essentially medita- 
 tive and discursive nature. He soon produced 
 his Thais, a veritable poem in prose, in which 
 the luxurious tones of Byzantine decadence were 
 artfully married with the bleak ascetic values of 
 the Egyptian desert. M. France has always had 
 a weakness for monachism, and has frequently 
 returned to the subject. 
 
 The work which first really called on him the 
 attention of the public was Le Crime de Sylvestre 
 Bonnard, published in 1881, which was crowned 
 by the Academy. In this delightful book, France 
 recreated the type of the old savant whose innocent 
 egotism is qualified by a more than average dose 
 of human kindness. The reader will not expect 
 to be taken through a catalogue raisonnt of M. 
 France's work. One may say briefly, that he has 
 written a great deal, and hardly anything except, 
 perhaps, if the criticism may be ventured, Le Lys 
 Rouge and the Histoire Comique, that is without 
 the peculiar and intimate charm that has come to 
 be associated with his name. 
 
 It is in La Rotisserie de la Reine Ptdauque and 
 its sequel, Les Opinions de M. Jerome Coignard, 
 that he has succeeded in expressing himself 
 supremely. In these books his fantasy and (an 
 enemy would say) his sophistry are suffused with 
 so rich a glow of kindly humanity as to be quite
 
 130 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 irresistible. We may disapprove of the Abbe* 
 Coignard : it is our right as law-abiding citizens 
 and respectable churchmen to do so ; but it is 
 impossible even to think of him without secret 
 joy. Poor M. Jerome! so great and so little, 
 so noble and so vile, who forgets his cassock 
 in the tavern, and his priesthood in the arms of 
 the ' fern me de chambre de Madame la Baillive'; 
 who discourses of morals with the eloquence of 
 Seneca, yet cheats at cards and pilfers jewels ; 
 who combines the most daring flights of specula- 
 tion with the simplicity of true Christian faith ; 
 and who, after a vagabond existence among 
 wenches and pot-boys, eked out, according to 
 circumstances, by deciphering Egyptian manu- 
 scripts or writing love-letters for maid-servants, 
 finally dies a holy and edifying death from the 
 effects of a wound received in the course of a 
 disreputable adventure what are we to say of 
 him, and why do we love him ? The reason of 
 our love is not far to seek. And we may turn for 
 it to a doctor of the Abbe Coignard's communion. 
 In the Dream of Gerontius, Cardinal Newman 
 sums up the balance sheet of a man as : 
 
 Majesty dwarfed to baseness, poisonous flower running to 
 
 seed; 
 
 Who never art so near to crime and shame 
 As when thou hast achieved some deed of name.
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 131 
 
 We love M. Jerome Coignard because he is a 
 living, sensible epitome of humanity, of our own 
 hearts. Thus and thus are we, though it may 
 not suit us to admit the fact. And, oddly enough, 
 in spite of this invincible disinclination, the vicarious 
 unveiling of our own hearts gives us a pleasure of 
 a most delightful quality, such epicures in moral 
 sensation have we become. It gives us the illusion 
 of the confession we shall never make, of the 
 sincerity we shall never achieve. And the illusion 
 also of that peace of heart, which, as theologians 
 assure us, is the accompaniment and reward of 
 true contrition. So we have ample motives for 
 loving M. Jerome Coignard. This great and 
 good man, at once philosopher and hedge priest, 
 a splendid toper and an accomplished scholar, is 
 first introduced to us in the roasting shop of 
 Leonard Menetrier, who plies his laudable trade 
 in the Rue St. Jacques, at the sign of La Reine 
 Ptdauque. Here the Abb6 finds his daily cover 
 laid in return for the instructions which he gives 
 the roaster's son Jacques, commonly called Tourne- 
 broche, in virtue of the office which he shares 
 with the dog Miraut. This Jacques becomes his 
 master's devoted disciple and biographer. We 
 will not follow them through their adventures, 
 which include the frequentation of a charming 
 and crazy hermetic philosopher (an admirably
 
 132 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 reconstructed eighteenth-century type), some 
 incidental fighting, and more than one episode 
 of the kind that, in France, legitimately adds to 
 the gaiety of life, and, in England, is never 
 mentioned. Let us, rather, briefly dwell on the 
 ideas conveyed by these delightful books. They 
 represent, with the conversations of M. Bergeret 
 in the four volumes of the Histoire Contemporaine, 
 the ripest moods of M. France's philosophy, a 
 philosophy which, due allowance being made for 
 temperamental variations the inevitable sanction 
 of which is one of its principal charms is held, 
 in substance, by many of the best minds in Europe 
 to-day. 
 
 I have already indicated the school of thought 
 to which M. France belongs. He is of the 
 great school of Elis, the school of Pyrrho. With 
 the nuance, however, of his time. He has expressly 
 told us, in his answer to M. Brunetiere, who had 
 attacked him as a mere subjectivist, self-dispensed 
 from the arduous labour of exact knowledge, that 
 he believes in 'the relativity of things and the 
 succession of phenomena ' : that is in science. M. 
 France believes then in science ; but let not 
 dogmatists of any kind, even those who frequent 
 the Royal Institution, presume to hail him as a 
 fellow. ' What,' asks the Abbe" Coignard, ' is the 
 knowledge of Nature but the fantasy of our
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 133 
 
 senses?' This is discouraging; and it seems as 
 if the saintly immobility, the blessed ataraxy of 
 the fakir, would be the practical translation of 
 such an attitude. On the contrary, no man is 
 more interested in life than he. No detail of 
 humanity's long pilgrimage escapes his affectionate 
 curiosity. His faithful love of men and their 
 doings is, rather than the mere abstract passion 
 of erudition, at the bottom of his ceaseless interest 
 in history. The fact is that the teachings of 
 Pyrrho are at once reinforced in his mind, and 
 qualified by those of another Greek philosopher, 
 the divine Epicurus. 
 
 Walter Savage Landor used to say that we 
 should walk through life with Epicurus on the 
 one hand and Epictetus on the other. In a 
 similar vein M. France says that the former 
 philosopher and St. Francis of Assisi are the 
 two best friends and mutual correctives that 
 humanity has found on its path through the 
 world. The Stoic rigour is alien to his temperate 
 and kindly wisdom : ' II ne faut pas exagerer le 
 mal que Ton fait.' Rather would he extol the 
 golden moderation of the garden philosopher, and 
 dwell on the Preacher's advice not to be wise 
 overmuch. The temper of that colony perched 
 on ' a certain breezy tableland projecting from the 
 African coast,' of which Mr. Pater has written so
 
 134 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 delightfully, is his. A true Cyrenaic, Horace's 
 summing up of the philosophy of the founder of 
 Cyrene may be justly applied to him : omnis 
 Aristippum decuit color et status et res. 
 
 Indeed, Aristippus is nearer to him than Pyrrho. 
 The latter had thrown the universal doubt that lies 
 coiled at the root of knowledge ' the little dead 
 red worm therein' into a blank abstract interrog- 
 ative ; but he, apparently, did not realise that life 
 and speculation are two things, that, even though 
 both we ourselves and the appearances that dance 
 over our sensorium, are from the point of view of 
 speculative analysis, but vain shadows together, 
 that fact does not make them or us any less inter- 
 esting, does not even tend to lower or qualify in 
 any way their human value. For it is evident that 
 that value springs wholly from the undeniable 
 experience of relation ; what exactly is related to 
 what is irrelevant. At least it is charitable to 
 suppose that, when Pyrrho passed his master 
 Aristarchus wailing for help in a ditch, on the 
 ground that his unfortunate plight stood in need 
 of metaphysical proof, he mixed up two things. 
 And it is certainly impossible to imagine that 
 M. France would have left Renan, his one master 
 among moderns, in a ditch for such reasons. 
 
 It is characteristic of M. France's detachment 
 from popular, or indeed any kind of polemics, that,
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 135 
 
 while he himself remains scrupulously, and it would 
 seem unregretfully un-Christian, his most important 
 philosophical protagonist should be a Catholic 
 priest. No doubt he has expressed his personal 
 attitude more fully in his Bergeret of the Histoire 
 Contemporaine. But M. Bergeret is by no means 
 so convincing or so attractive as M. Coignard. 
 Dare one say it ? He is at times distinctly tedious. 
 Whether it is that he suffers unduly from his sordid 
 domestic surroundings, or from the stifling atmo- 
 sphere of his gossiping little university, or from 
 what strikes a foreign observer as the abject pro- 
 vincialism of contemporary French public life, one 
 certainly grows weary of him. Not so of M. Coig- 
 nard. To him M. France has dispensed all his 
 inimitable charm ; he has lavished on him the finest 
 resources of his art. That he should have done so 
 is, as I have said, characteristic of his detachment 
 from popular causes ; it also surely indicates the 
 exquisite fairness, the crystalline probity of his 
 mind. Not thus are philosophers wont to treat 
 philosophers who have the misfortune to differ 
 from them. Schopenhauer no doubt the case was 
 exceptional called Hegel by name and in print 
 an 'intellectual Caliban' and a 'charlatan.' But to 
 return to our Abbe ! , 
 
 I cannot do better than make some quotations 
 from M. France's own analysis of his hero :
 
 136 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 I am not afraid to affirm that M. l'Abb Coignard, 
 philosopher and Christian, united in an incomparable 
 combination the Epicureanism that preserves us from 
 pain and the holy simplicity that leads us to joy. It is 
 remarkable that, not only did he accept the idea of God 
 as it was provided for him by the Catholic faith, but also 
 that he endeavoured to maintain it by arguments of a 
 rational order. He never imitated the practical ability 
 of professional Deists who make, for their own use, a God, 
 at once moral, philanthropic, and modest (pudigue), with 
 whom they enjoy the satisfaction of a perfect under- 
 standing. The close relations which they establish with 
 him procure for their writings a great deal of authority, 
 and for their persons much consideration from the public. 
 And this governmental God, moderate, solemn, free from 
 all fanaticism, and who knows the world (qui a du monde), 
 recommends them in assemblies, drawing-rooms, and 
 academies. M. 1'Abbe Coignard did not fashion to him- 
 self so profitable an Eternal. But, reflecting that it is 
 impossible to conceive of the universe, except under the 
 categories of the intelligence, and that the Cosmos must 
 be held to be intelligible, even in view of the demonstra- 
 tion of its absurdity, he referred its cause to an intelli- 
 gence which he called God, leaving to this term its infinite 
 vagueness, while for the rest he went to theology, which, 
 as we know, treats of the unknowable with a minute 
 exactitude. This reserve which marks the limits of his 
 intelligence was a happy one if, as I think, it removed 
 from him the temptation to nibble at some appetising 
 system of philosophy, and saved him from pushing his 
 nose into one of those mouse-traps in which the emanci- 
 pated spirits hasten to get caught. At his ease in the 
 great old rat-hole, he found more than one issue through 
 which to discover the world and observe nature. I do 
 not share his religious beliefs, and I think that they
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 137 
 
 deceived him, as they have deceived for their happiness 
 and misery so many generations of men. But it would 
 seem that the ancient errors are less annoying than the 
 modern ones, and that, since we must be deceived, the 
 better part for us is to cling to the illusions which have 
 lost their roughness. 
 
 So much for the Abbe Coignard's metaphysic 
 and theology. His attitude towards the latter was 
 that of no less a thinker than Descartes, who placed 
 his theology under the segis of Pere Mersenne. 
 Let us now hear M. France on his ethic. 
 
 Never did human spirit show itself at once so bold 
 and so pacific, or steep its disdain in greater sweetness. 
 His ethic united the liberty of the cynical philosophers 
 with the candour of the first friars of the holy Portiun- 
 cula. He despised men with tenderness; he tried to 
 teach them that the only side on which they had a little 
 grandeur being a capacity for pain, the one useful and 
 beautiful quality for them was pity ; that able only to 
 desire and suffer, they should make to themselves indul- 
 gent and voluptuous virtues. He thus came to consider 
 pride the only source of the greatest evils, and the only 
 vice contrary to nature. It would seem indeed that men 
 make themselves miserable by the exaggerated feeling 
 which they have for themselves and their kind, and that, if 
 they had a humbler and truer idea of human nature, they 
 would be gentler to each other and themselves. It was 
 his benevolence which urged him to humiliate his fellows 
 in their sentiments, their knowledge, their philosophy, and 
 their institutions. He had it at heart to show them that 
 their imbecile nature has neither imagined nor con- 
 structed anything worthy of a very energetic attack or 
 defence, and that, if they knew the fragility and sim-
 
 138 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 plicity of their greatest works, such as their laws and 
 their empires, they would fight for them only in play and 
 for fun, like children who build sand castles on the beach. 
 Moreover, one should not be either astonished or scan- 
 dalised at the fact that he abased all the ideas by which 
 man exalts his glory and honour at the expense of his 
 repose. The majesty of the law did not impose on his 
 clear-sighted soul ; and he regretted that poor wretches 
 should be subjected to so many obligations of which, in 
 most cases, one can discover neither the origin nor the 
 meaning. All principles seemed to him equally contest- 
 able. He had come to believe that citizens only con- 
 demned so many of their kind to infamy in order to 
 enjoy by contrast the joys of public respect. This view 
 made him prefer bad company to good, after the example 
 of Him who lived among publicans and prostitutes. He 
 preserved there purity of heart, the gift of sympathy, and 
 the treasures of mercy. 
 
 M. Coignard's philosophy showed to special 
 advantage in his criticism of social justice, militar- 
 ism, magistrates, police, and political institutions 
 generally. Not one did his genial and mordant 
 analysis leave standing. Yet he was no revolu- 
 tionary. He was, as he said, like the old woman 
 of Syracuse, who prayed for the preservation of 
 the existing tyrant the worst, she observed, that 
 there had ever been on the ground that a still 
 
 O 
 
 worse one would surely succeed him. He seems 
 to have believed in what human improvement he 
 thought possible, on the ground of an ingenious 
 application to moral and social matters of the law
 
 139 
 
 of ' actual causes.' Sir Charles Lyell, as is known, 
 maintained, some fifty years ago, that the various 
 changes that have come about in the earth's surface 
 during the course of the ages were not due, as was 
 then commonly supposed, to sudden cataclysms, 
 but to the gradual operation of slow and imper- 
 ceptible causes, which to this day continue their 
 silent invisible task of transforming the crust of the 
 planet. M. Coignard seems to have applied the 
 analogy of Lyell 's theory to the phenomena of 
 social growth and development. For instance, he 
 hated war, partly on moral grounds, and partly, 
 no doubt, because, as Fontenelle said, it inter- 
 rupted conversation. He looked forward to its 
 disappearance, not as the result of any conscious 
 effort of humanity, such as the forcible establish- 
 ment of courts of arbitration and the like, but 
 rather as the inevitable consequence of a perfect 
 balance of power, to be brought about at last by 
 the equalisation of the armaments of rival states. 
 The evil would thus kill itself. Similarly, the 
 absurdities of legal justice would at length reach 
 such a point as gradually to melt away of them- 
 selves before the irony of a human being, the son 
 of our loins, rather more clear-sighted than his 
 parents, but not in any way essentially differing 
 from them. So, then, the Abbe Coignard believed 
 in justice, and, so far, was no sceptic? Yes, he
 
 140 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 believed in justice, and in ' whatsoever things are 
 of good report ' ; but he did not think that the 
 home of these things was among men. Justice 
 was to him the vanishing point of the perspective 
 of human society, the ideal existence of which is 
 necessarily implied in all human aspiration, while 
 its achievement, as a fact, is as necessarily denied 
 to all human effort. 
 
 We may note here a profound difference between 
 the Abbe Coignard's doctrine and that of the 
 Revolution. That great movement in human 
 affairs was based on the belief in the natural 
 justice of Man. Condorcet is as clear on this 
 point as Jean - Jacques. The Abbe Coignard 
 would have said that man, being naturally unjust, 
 tends obscurely and intermittently to improve him- 
 self in the direction of justice, but that unjust he 
 is by nature and unjust by nature he always will 
 remain. He held no illusions about humanity. 
 Had he been able, with prophetic mind, to gauge 
 the great biological generalisation which has in 
 modern times so profoundly modified all our 
 thoughts concerning man and his destiny, there is 
 little doubt that he would have sided with Darwin 
 against Rousseau. His principal objection to the 
 philosophy of the latter would have been that it 
 assumed an unscientific difference of kind between 
 the gorilla and its human descendant. So he may,
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 141 
 
 in a sense, be considered as the precursor of the 
 modern retrograde tclairt. There is, at least, little 
 doubt that were he among us to-day, the party 
 represented by that superior person would on the 
 whole have his approval. I do not, of course, 
 mean that all its contemporary manifestations, par- 
 ticularly in France, would have his support. 
 Rather his sense of irony, not to mention his 
 Christian charity, would detach him from not a 
 few of its methods. But, on the whole, the atti- 
 tude would have his approval. 
 
 M. Bergeret in the Histoire Contemporaine is 
 the other most important incarnation of M. France's 
 thought. Here we have another type of sceptic. 
 The Abb Coignard had not much faith in men, 
 but he had plenty of faith in God : and his ideal 
 beliefs, far from dimming his vision of actuality, 
 served, on the contrary, to make it keener. He 
 whose trust was in the Eternal could afford to 
 recognise to the full the absurdity of passing 
 events. His religious faith kept his heart sound 
 and his moral nature sweet and true to the essential 
 norms of human instinct. He was pure in heart 
 because he saw God. M. Bergeret did not see 
 God, and in human life saw little else than a wilful 
 mass of indecent absurdity. And in consequence 
 M. Bergeret was unhappy. He did not merely 
 suffer from passing low spirits. He was per-
 
 142 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 manently, radically, essentially unhappy. Never- 
 theless in spite of his unhappiness, he is, in a sense, 
 a more mature expression of his Creator's philo- 
 sophy than the Abbe" Coignard. 
 
 That Anatole France is an individualist of the 
 finest water is sufficiently evident from everything 
 he has ever said or written. It is his nature to 
 form his own opinions in his own way and solely 
 for his own gratification. The vitality of his 
 contribution is due to the intensity with which it 
 expresses now this, now that aspect of his extra- 
 ordinarily versatile personality. His method of 
 criticism displayed more clearly in the four volumes 
 of his Vie Littdraire than in his professedly 
 imaginative work, is a significant self-revelation. 
 It consists in a certain subtle and sympathetic 
 penetration, which almost reaches the point of 
 self- identification with his subject. It is in this 
 way that he produces his illusion of objectivity. 
 Thus, whether he is writing of Asiatic religions, 
 contemporary literature, science or philosophy, his 
 subject seems to be spontaneously yielding up its 
 inmost secret to the compelling courtesy of his 
 investigation as a flower yields its perfume to the 
 caresses of the sun. For he treats all ideas with 
 the uniform and exquisite politeness of the sceptic. 
 Indeed his scepticism is an important part of his 
 success as a critic. It is after all not until an idea
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 143 
 
 has ceased to be an ideal that it becomes a fruitful 
 subject for criticism. 
 
 Anatole France evidently represents a more 
 developed, a more philosophical scepticism than 
 any other writer noticed in these studies. His 
 position is roughly that our only knowledge is 
 science, and that that only knowledge besides 
 bearing solely on the relations of things, not on 
 their nature, and, therefore, in no way dispelling 
 our essential ignorance of them, is at any given 
 point, owing to the progressive method by which 
 we acquire it, more wrong than right. For the 
 science of to-day so transforms that of yesterday 
 as to make it false, and there will always be 
 to-morrow to be counted with. Nevertheless the 
 method of science, i.e. the application of the 
 category of causation to the connections of pheno- 
 mena, while telling us nothing whatever about 
 their intimate nature or even their real existence, 
 which it assumes and leaves for ever totally 
 unexplained and unproved, is, subjectively speaking, 
 the legitimate development of the instinct of 
 knowledge. It is in scientific terms the 'law' of 
 that instinct, which merely means that that is the 
 way in which that instinct behaves when it reaches 
 maturity. Behind this fact of our nature for it is 
 a psychological fact that so and not otherwise does 
 our mind work it is impossible to go. It is
 
 144 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 equally impossible to discuss its validity as a 
 philosophical principle, for, in order to do so, we 
 have to assume it : it is therefore but waste of 
 breath either to attribute or deny to it metaphysical 
 cogency. This fully developed scepticism is a 
 very different matter from the scepticism of the 
 eighteenth century. That movement emancipated 
 the human mind from theology ; the sceptic of 
 to-day is emancipated from the superstition of 
 reason. The first emancipation leaves the mind 
 anxious and ill at ease, at times a ready prey, on 
 the rebound, for some new fashion of credulity, and 
 if the intellectual character is too strongly knit to 
 find a fancied peace in such a solution, suffering, in 
 proportion to the emotional depth of a man's 
 nature, must ensue. Me*rime is a case in point. 
 But when error is torn up by the roots, when the 
 mind is emancipated from the illusion of reason no 
 less than from that of theology, man begins at last 
 to live. He acquiesces in the limitations of his 
 cerebral convolutions, he is resigned to his lot. 
 Nay, he comes to love it with all its defects, with 
 all its drawbacks. ' Ma petitesse m'est chere ! ' 
 cries M. France, and Nietzsche's ' Amor Fati ' is 
 nothing but a more grandiloquent phrase for the 
 same feeling. Accepting his destiny in no grudg- 
 ing spirit, doing, that is cheerfully and with full 
 connaissance de cause what in any case he must do,
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 145 
 
 the sceptic turns himself to the loving cultivation 
 of human nature. And he finds his sufficient 
 reward. For now a miracle happens. The sword 
 of his intelligence, which snapped like a silvered 
 lathe when employed on immensities and incom- 
 prehensibilities, becomes, when turned to its true 
 uses, a sure and tempered weapon in his hand. 
 Art and science and the cautious betterment of 
 human lot within the limits of human nature, are 
 the appropriate objects on which his ' Practical 
 Reason ' exercises itself. 
 
 There are those who see in the fact that M. 
 France has devoted himself of late years to the 
 furtherance of social justice a backsliding from his 
 intellectual ideals. The criticism is, I think, a 
 petty one. It is indeed legitimate to question the 
 wisdom of his methods. We may reasonably 
 doubt that the socialistic tendencies which he 
 encourages will, if triumphant, produce what he 
 hopes for, but that it is irrational for a sceptic to 
 endeavour to make himself and his fellow-creatures 
 more comfortable on this peculiar planet is itself 
 the most irrational of propositions. A great living 
 philosopher tells us, that even if we are all going to 
 Hell next week it is worth while, in the interval, to 
 read Robert Browning in preference to Robert 
 Montgomery. Equally, whatever be the ultimate 
 destiny of humanity, even if the phrase have, in 
 
 K
 
 146 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 strict thought, no meaning, it is important that 
 existing humanity should be as happy and success- 
 ful as the nature of things permits. 
 
 The belief in the universal flux of things, in the 
 absence of any ascertainable moral or intellectual 
 order in the world, has represented the conviction 
 of some of the serenest and finest of human 
 intelligences. It was the mental attitude of an 
 Epicurus, a Democritus, a Montaigne, a Gassendi. 
 M. France has put it before us once more with 
 unrivalled clearness and beauty of expression, and 
 with a modernity of touch that makes it move in 
 our minds as an actual form of our own experience. 
 The sheet lightning of his quiet irony illuminates 
 it; and the glow of his pity suffuses it with an 
 irresistibly attractive humanity. To have rendered 
 thus perfectly, with so fine and conscientious an 
 art, his personal vision of life, gives him his 
 supreme claim on our admiration, on our intelligent 
 sympathy. The commerce of wisdom, we are told 
 by the Preacher, is pleasant. Those who doubt it 
 cannot do better than turn to the works of Anatole 
 France.
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 NOTES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
 DISILLUSION 1 
 
 THE faith in reason of the philosophers of the 
 eighteenth century, however noble and socially 
 beneficial an attitude, was not, and could not be, 
 the permanent resting-place of the human mind. 
 Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot, to take three 
 different types of eighteenth-century thinkers, were 
 all agreed, in spite of their personal differences, on 
 the point that the unfettered use of reason was all 
 that was needed to place man in possession of 
 truth and happiness. Their position involved two 
 important a priori principles, emphatically articles 
 of faith, not of reason ; and neither more nor less 
 articles of faith than the fundamental tenets of the 
 
 1 It need hardly be said that these ' Notes' are not intended as a 
 formal exposition of the Philosophy of Disillusion. They are merely 
 meant to suggest and illustrate certain positions which are more 
 widely held to-day than those who do not hold them may think. 
 Those who wish to study the subject in systematic detail cannot do 
 better than refer to the works of M. Jules de Gaultier and of 
 M. Remy de Gourmont, published by the Socie"te du Mercure de 
 France, Paris. 
 
 147
 
 148 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 Church. They assumed, prior to all investigation, 
 the completely rational nature of reality, and the 
 essential goodness of all men. The disillusion of 
 these men was the result of the conquest of one 
 faith by another. That is to say, it was not, 
 properly speaking, a fundamental disillusion. 
 Faith in man took the place of faith in God, 
 Paradise became the ultimate state of society to 
 which reason was tending, Providence, when 
 science came to eke out their conceptions, became 
 evolution, God became immanent in and indis- 
 tinguishable from man ; and, in the case of the 
 true devotees of humanity, the religious symphony 
 was merely transferred into another key. 
 
 There was thus a symbolic fitness in the worship 
 of the Goddess of Reason on the dismantled altar 
 of Notre Dame. The Altar, the principle of 
 religion, remained, it was only the object of worship 
 that was changed. The well-meaning people who 
 organised that remarkable function, like their 
 earliest predecessors in the attempt to destroy 
 Christianity, knew not what they did. Had they 
 pushed their philosophical analysis so far as to 
 criticise their new deity, they would have realised 
 that it was no more unreasonable to worship the 
 Sacred Host of Christian tradition, than an un- 
 usually stout courtesan. That analysis indeed, had 
 they but known it, was already, in its essentials,
 
 EPILOGUE 149 
 
 complete. The Critique of Pure Reason had 
 appeared twelve years before the apotheosis of 
 Mile. Candeille. 
 
 The work of Kant was of the most revolutionary 
 description. In the course of his Transcendental 
 Dialectic, he refutes the ontological proof of the 
 existence of God, the argument of St. Anselm, 
 Descartes and Leibnitz. He equally shows the 
 inanity of the other two traditional arguments, the 
 physico-theological and the cosmological, which had 
 been the mainstay of the philosophy of the Catholic 
 Schools. On the other hand, the antitheses in the 
 second and third Antinomies show the impossibility 
 of the existence of a simple substance, and conse- 
 quently of the soul, in the theological sense of the 
 term, and destroy the possibility of human liberty 
 in an ordered universe. The main theses of the 
 philosophers of the French enlightenment were 
 thus pricked. Most of them, indeed, were Deists, 
 and even the Atheists required a moral Absolute. 
 Kant's intellect, however, was one thing, and his 
 temperament another. The evangelical Christian 
 could not endure the conclusions of the philosopher, 
 and the Critique of Practical Reason laboured to 
 restore the spiritualist positions of which the first 
 Critique had made short work. Resuming the 
 conclusions of the first Critique in the proposi- 
 tion that God, Freedom and Immortality were
 
 150 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 indemonstrable, and therefore unknowable to Pure 
 Reason, Kant here insists on their ' practical ' 
 truth, which, when analysed, comes to mean that 
 it is wise for creatures situated as we are to believe 
 them to be true. 
 
 At the side of the great metaphysical poems 
 of Fichte, Hegel, Lotze and other minor post- 
 Kantian thinkers, the philosophy of disillusion has 
 pursued its course through the nineteenth century 
 from the Critique of Pure Reason through 
 Schopenhauer to Nietzsche. It has consisted in 
 the development of Kant's idealism into a purely 
 subjective phenomenalism. To put its main con- 
 clusion less technically, it has shown, not from 
 abstract considerations but by means of an analysis 
 of the act of knowledge as it occurs in our experi- 
 ence, that thought cannot transcend the strictly 
 relative co-ordination of experience. The Absolute 
 Realities, which form the theme of the various 
 dogmatic systems which derive directly or indirectly 
 from Platonism, it has shown (incompletely in the 
 Critique of Pure Reason ; with completeness in 
 Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root of the Principle of 
 Sufficient Reason) to be nothing but the lenses 
 through which the faculty of knowledge represents 
 to itself the notion of external existence. The 
 important discovery of Schopenhauer was not the 
 oriental myth of the self-realising and the self-
 
 EPILOGUE 151 
 
 annihilating Will of the World, but his simple and 
 irrefutable statement that the act of knowledge 
 betrayed on analysis its own relativity, consisting, 
 as it necessarily did, of the representation of an 
 object for a subject, thus implying an essential 
 dualism. From this impregnable position it was 
 easy to show that the doctrine of an absolute 
 knowledge identified in its inmost nature with 
 absolute being involved a meaningless proposition. 
 The roots of Theism, as a philosophical explana- 
 tion of the world, were cut away. M. Jules de 
 Gaultier, who represents better than any contem- 
 porary the Philosophy of Disillusion to-day, has 
 pointed out in his excellent book, De Kant a 
 Nietzsche, that Kant, while preparing the way for 
 Schopenhauer's theological Nihilism, had, even in 
 the first Critique, endeavoured to cover his own 
 traces. ' What Kant is careful not to say,' observes 
 M. de Gaultier, ' no matter how strong the evidence 
 which constrains him to say it, is that the idea of a 
 First Cause, taken as a transcendental concept, is, 
 in the highest degree, one of those concepts which 
 are formed in contradiction to the laws of reason, 
 and which have only to be formulated to be dis- 
 avowed. Reason furnishes us with the principle of 
 causality, with which to arrange the phenomenal 
 world : everything which exists, exists in virtue of 
 a cause. A cause then being a thing which exists,
 
 152 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 the right deduction, in order to manifest the prin- 
 ciple in its blinding light, is that every cause has a 
 cause. That is the principle of reason which must 
 not be transgressed, and which the idea of a First 
 Cause, a cause without a cause, directly violates.' 
 And M. de Gaultier goes on to observe, with a 
 lucidity which many philosophers might envy : 
 ' When the reason seeks an explanation of the 
 universe, it goes without saying that that explana- 
 tion must be intelligible to the reason. The 
 intelligence is in a state of ignorance before the 
 mystery, the question of the reason demands a 
 reply which shall dissipate that ignorance. Now 
 to attempt to dissipate that ignorance by the 
 application of the principle of causality in its 
 legitimate form to the Whole of phenomena, con- 
 sidered as the effect of a cause situated outside 
 that Whole, is, on the one hand, a kind of 
 anthropomorphism, but, above all, it explains no- 
 thing, because the form of the principle of causality 
 will forthwith oblige the mind to seek for the cause 
 of that cause outside the world, remounting in- 
 definitely in the void from cause to cause. If, in 
 order to obviate this inconvenience, theology forms 
 the concept of a First Cause, no more real explana- 
 tion is given, for the addition of a word cannot 
 change the nature of reason, and make intelligible 
 what was unintelligible before : mystery is not
 
 EPILOGUE 153 
 
 explained by the incomprehensible. . . . To explain 
 the existence of the universe by means of this 
 concept is to propose to the reason to admit that 
 two plus two equals five, and to insinuate that at 
 the price of that concession hitherto insoluble 
 problems can be solved.' M. de Gaultier relates 
 this divergent branching of Kant's intellect and 
 temperament to what he considers to be the general 
 law of philosophical development, and which is, at 
 least, a more than ingenious hypothesis. It is this. 
 The Vital Instinct and the Instinct of Knowledge, 
 far from being the allies that popular educational- 
 ists proclaim them to be, are at secret war with 
 each other. The Vital Instinct expresses itself at 
 the origin of one of those groups of human beings 
 that we call a race, in a collection of moral, 
 physical and mental attitudes, that have nothing to 
 do with the question of truth, but that represent 
 more or less successfully the conditions of its 
 durability and power to the extent to which the 
 race is conscious of them at that moment. These 
 prescriptions are the work of a law-giving priest- 
 hood, and are codified in religious forms, that is, 
 in taboos. It seems an acquired fact that they are 
 always represented as the teaching of revelation, 
 never as the result of observation or knowledge. 
 In process of time, the Instinct of Knowledge 
 awakes in some sceptic, whose vitality is declining,
 
 154 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 and if he cannot be suppressed, he has to be 
 answered. And now occurs a curious inversion of 
 roles. The Vital Instinct disguises itself as the 
 Instinct of Knowledge, and if unable to save the 
 old myth, promptly invents a new one to take its 
 place. In an advanced community, where an 
 appeal to reason is implied in all propositions, the 
 myth is philosophical rather than crudely natural- 
 istic in construction. But it is no less a myth, that 
 is, a transposition into,such terms of reality, as the 
 community is prepared imaginatively to accept, of 
 the vital needs of the moment. M. de Gaultier 
 illustrates this thesis by an analysis of the dogma 
 of Monotheism. The dogma consists of belief in 
 a God, external to the world, who is its creator, 
 revealing, either miraculously, by infringing the 
 determinism elsewhere observable, or naturally, by 
 inspiration in human consciousness, a moral law, 
 i.e. a good to practise and an evil to avoid. It 
 involves also the belief in man's free will, by means 
 of which he is capable of observing or disobeying 
 the law, thus incurring merit or demerit, and 
 deserving punishment or reward. Monotheism 
 springs, historically speaking, from two distinct 
 roots, Judaism and the philosophy of Plato. In 
 its purely religious form, that of direct revelation, 
 it represents the categorical imperative of the Vital 
 Instinct, asserting itself in a manner beyond any
 
 EPILOGUE 155 
 
 question of rational proof. It is so because life is 
 so, not because we think it to be so. It is otherwise 
 with Monotheism considered as a philosophical 
 explanation of the world. In this case proof is 
 required, and it is here that M. de Gaultier detects 
 the deforming effect of the Vital Instinct on the 
 mechanism of the intellect. 
 
 The enigma of knowledge presents itself under 
 a triple aspect to Plato. There is first the scientific 
 question, how do we know external objects ? Then 
 there are the two other categories of objects, those 
 of the moral and those of the metaphysical world, 
 already created in a rudimentary fashion by the 
 Vital Instinct, which demands that the philosopher 
 should complete the work begun. These objects, 
 being the creation of the mind, are, of course, very 
 easy to handle. They are not under the control 
 of space or time ; never appearing in the 
 phenomenal world, which cannot exist except in 
 space and time, they can easily brave any possible 
 refutation from experience. It is easy to believe 
 them to be of the same nature as the intelligence 
 which conceives them ; then, all that is necessary 
 is once for all to declare them endowed with exist- 
 ence, outside as well as within the mind. The ruse 
 here, consists in the fact that the mind being un- 
 able to explain the fact of knowledge by the fact 
 of existence, quietly reverses the terms of the
 
 156 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 problem, and attributes to knowledge the power to 
 create being. It is exactly the same process, in 
 the intellectual sphere, as that of primitive man 
 constructing his idols, and then persuading himself 
 that he owes to them his own existence. 
 
 The whole of this process, when it is dealing 
 with the objects of the moral or metaphysical 
 world, is, as has been said, beyond the possibility 
 of experimental verification or refutation. The 
 vagueness of content of these objects, compared 
 to the definiteness of the objects of the external 
 world, is also a further protection to the vicious 
 construction of the process. Let us observe it at 
 work on the fundamental problem of knowledge ; 
 how do we know of the existence of external 
 objects in the phenomenal world ? 
 
 The knowledge of an object, says the Platonic 
 Socrates, supposes that a definition can be given 
 of it, and to define is to classify and limit under 
 the category of a general idea. But this general 
 idea, which confers on the object knowable exist- 
 ence, does not itself belong to the object. Nor 
 can it be derived from the senses which give us, 
 at the most, very incomplete information about 
 objects. Where will Plato find the locus of these 
 ideas, the necessary intermediaries of our know- 
 ledge ? Not in human reason, for they are, he says, 
 its objects, being independent of human reason, in
 
 EPILOGUE 157 
 
 the same way as external objects are independent 
 of the senses. It is in the Divine Reason, of which 
 they are the attributes, that these ideas, the eternal 
 types of the particular objects, perceived by the 
 senses, have their real and substantial existence. 
 This is the doctrine of the Platonic Ideas, and if the 
 greatness of philosophic doctrines is to be measured 
 by their influence and duration, it is undoubtedly 
 one of the greatest. It is still, after twenty-four 
 centuries, the ill-disguised backbone of all absolute 
 metaphysic, and the substance of all theology, 
 which claims, in any sense, to incorporate reason. 
 
 From the point of view of logic, it is, however, 
 singularly vulnerable. I know the dog of Alci- 
 biades by means of the idea of dog, I proceed 
 in abstraction to the idea of a mammal, from that 
 to the idea of an animal in general, from that to the 
 idea of existence in general. But does on that 
 account existence in general exist ? Is there out- 
 side my mind an object which can be called 
 existence in general ? Evidently not. Existence 
 abstracted from any particular existence, is nothing 
 but a category of the mind indispensable to the 
 representation of external objects, all of which are 
 said to exist, because the act of knowledge 
 necessarily groups them under that category in 
 itself nothing but a pure mental form. 
 
 This quiproquo, by means of which thought adds
 
 158 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 to Us legitimate function of regulating reality the 
 pretension to create it, is, as has been said, the 
 source of all religious philosophy, it is also at the 
 bottom of all philosophy that implies the recogni- 
 tion of any other than a purely phenomenal value 
 in phenomena. All schemes of ' progress ' that 
 represent experience as moving by its own nature 
 towards the realisation of an intellectual or a moral 
 absolute, depend upon it. Even Pragmatism, the 
 fashion of the moment, in spite of its jaunty dis- 
 claimer of metaphysic, is, at least, its illegitimate 
 descendant. 
 
 Philosophy, like the kingdom of Heaven, has 
 rarely been sought for its own sake alone, and the 
 consequences of philosophical disillusion extend 
 further than the purely intellectual domain. I 
 have said that to refuse to admit the creation of 
 reality by thought excludes the belief in the exist- 
 ence of absolute values in experience. Morality, 
 in the sense that it has commonly been understood 
 during the reign of the Platonic Ideas, must go. 
 Kant's miraculous Categorical Imperative is an 
 empty phrase, bombinans in vacuo, not so much 
 false as entirely meaningless. Conduct appeals 
 primarily to utility, secondarily to taste, virtue 
 recovers its etymological meaning and becomes 
 again the virtus of the Romans. We appreciate 
 human beings, like wines, by their qualities. If
 
 EPILOGUE 159 
 
 their behaviour is hostile to a few obviously 
 recognised utilities we call them criminals, and 
 suppress or shut them up if we can. At a further 
 stage of discrimination, if we find them unattractive, 
 we avoid them if we are wise. There is no 
 mystery about this. Here, if anywhere, we are 
 chez nous. It is simply a question of affinities and 
 reactions ; as it were, a chemical problem. At 
 identical stages of culture, ethical prepossession, 
 i.e. taste in conduct, tends appreciably to repeat 
 itself unchanged in different individuals, which 
 agreement constitutes a social sanction to the taste 
 of the group. But that agreement guarantees 
 merely a social sanction. The fact that most 
 people like dry champagne does not constitute that 
 taste an absolute value. There is no difference 
 of kind between moral qualities and good manners. 
 There is no doubt that such conclusions as these 
 are wellnigh intolerable to many people. In fact, 
 roughly speaking, it is only those in whom the 
 instinct of knowledge has corroded their vitality 
 who can endure them complacently. Such as they 
 find their greatest joy in the gratification of their 
 intellect, and the justification of the world to them 
 consists solely in, its spectacular value. The Vital 
 Instinct may be trusted to keep them in a per- 
 manent minority, for too many of them would 
 bring humanity to an end. They will not, however,
 
 160 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 disappear except, indeed, possibly by violence ! 
 For the work of the analysis of the faculty of 
 knowledge has been done, and those, whose minds 
 are so constructed as to be able to appreciate 
 the process will not be able to escape its con- 
 clusions. Nor are they really so dangerous to 
 the interests of the Vital Instinct as some of its 
 champions may think. ' On peut diner sans p&:he 
 chez les athees, ils se damnent tout seuls,' said 
 the Abbe JeYome Coignard. The Philosophy of 
 Disillusion has nothing to offer save an entirely 
 disinterested intellectual gratification. There are 
 those to whom such a gratification is the most 
 precious part of their experience, but they are 
 very few, and such disinterested spectators of life 
 cannot be either proselytisers or fanatics. They 
 have no quarrel with life, they are far from the 
 intellectual arrogance of pessimism ; on the con- 
 trary, echoing Renan's ' Faisons le spectacle aussi 
 varie que possible,' they wish, and, au besoin, 
 encourage the Vital Instinct to work as energetically 
 as is compatible with their own safety. But what 
 of the other camp ? Is it permissible, to put the 
 question in the terms of M. de Gaultier's hypothesis, 
 to attempt to anticipate the secret of Life, to pro- 
 phesy the next mask which the Vital Instinct will 
 assume? The masks of philosophical religion, 
 (Protestantism filtering into Deism,) and humani-
 
 EPILOGUE 161 
 
 tarian rationalism, seem torn past mending. It is 
 difficult to imagine a new one. There is, of course, 
 science, but, apart from experimentalists, it does 
 not seem capable of creating any great enthusiasm. 
 Its intellectual prestige, and its value for industrial- 
 ism, for the improvement of the material conditions 
 of life, leave untouched the emotional part of man's 
 imagination. Under these circumstances it seems 
 not impossible that the Vital Instinct may return to 
 its earliest, most impenetrable mask, that of direct 
 revelation. The means is at hand. In spite of 
 philosophers, the Church is still in the world, and 
 the principle of the Church is as irrefutable as it 
 is indemonstrable. Its methods of representation 
 will, no doubt, have to be modified, theology has 
 been refuted as fact, and the shreds of philosophy 
 with which its apologists have attempted to drape 
 it have been ruthlessly torn from it. But surely 
 neither the vital instinct nor the Church will be 
 embarrassed by such trifles. It may be doubted 
 whether any single human being has ever believed 
 in a religious dogma as the conclusion of a syllogism. 
 Abyssus abyssum invocat. The man in whom the 
 vital instinct clamours for the satisfaction of religion 
 has already a subconscious faith in religion. And 
 the impossibility of establishing such faith either 
 on external facts or on philosophy, when thoroughly 
 brought home to him, leaves him with the alter-
 
 162 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 
 
 native of acceptance of authority or despair. 
 Between the two the Vital Instinct cannot hesitate. 
 A certain kind of temperament is as much deter- 
 mined to believe in religion as a certain kind of 
 intellect is determined to do without that belief. 
 Or rather, to be exact, the difference is not between 
 a temperament and an intellect, if, for the sake of 
 argument, these convenient distinctions may be 
 drawn, but between two kinds of temperament. 
 Pascal had certainly as much intellect as ever fell 
 to the lot of the most disabused philosopher. He 
 himself indeed was one of the greatest of philosophic 
 Nihilists, 1 but his intellect did not prevent him 
 believing in the God of Jansenism. And this 
 suggests another reflection. The psychological 
 unity of the individual, except in a purely 
 practical and relative sense, is a deduction from 
 spiritualist philosophy. There is no scientific 
 reason for thinking that a man's intellect and 
 temperament must be unified. Experience also 
 shows us that such unification is by no means 
 necessary. Pascal is a case in point, and Gassendi 
 was an excellent priest and an atheist in philosophy. 
 Similarly, there seems no reason why a man should 
 not accept the Philosophy of Disillusion with his 
 intellect and the Church with his Vital Instinct. 
 Such an attitude, to whatever other criticisms it 
 
 1 I hope to discuss this elsewhere in detail.
 
 EPILOGUE 163 
 
 may be open, at least, in no way offends the laws 
 of the intelligence. It is an acute remark of 
 M. de Gaultier's that if Kant had been a Catholic 
 he would not have written the Critique of Practical 
 Reason. Whether such an attitude is likely to be 
 widespread is another matter. A man will hardly 
 reach the conclusions of philosophic disillusion 
 unless he is the fortunate or unfortunate possessor 
 of an unusually developed instinct of knowledge. 
 The use of his mind must have been a dominant 
 and disinterested passion to him, bringing him its 
 own joy, simply by its exercise and quite indepen- 
 dently of its conclusions. An individual's energy 
 being necessarily limited, it seems unlikely that the 
 Vital Instinct will be strong enough to create the 
 religious need in such a man. But the possibility 
 of such a case cannot be denied either by science or 
 by the Philosophy of Disillusion. 
 
 S. DOMENICO DI FlESOLE, 
 October 1908. 
 
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