



Produced by ellinora, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)






+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber's note:                              |
|                                                 |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.  |
|                                                 |
+-------------------------------------------------+




THE GREAT FRENCH WRITERS

BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE




The Great French Writers.

MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ           BY GASTON BOISSIER.
GEORGE SAND                 BY E. CARO.
MONTESQUIEU                 BY ALBERT SOREL.
VICTOR COUSIN               BY JULES SIMON.
TURGOT                      BY LÉON SAY.
THIERS                      BY PAUL DE RÉMUSAT.
MADAME DE STAËL             BY ALBERT SOREL.
BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE     BY ARVÈDE BARINE.

OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION.

_Uniform in style. Price, $1.00 a volume._




The Great French Writers


BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE

BY

ARVÈDE BARINE

_TRANSLATED BY J. E. GORDON_

WITH A PREFACE BY

AUGUSTIN BIRRELL

[Illustration: Logo]

CHICAGO

A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY

1893




CONTENTS.

CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
  I. YOUTH--YEARS OF TRAVEL                                1

 II. PERIOD OF UNCERTAINTY--VOYAGE TO THE ISLE
       OF FRANCE; ACQUAINTANCE WITH J. J. ROUSSEAU;
       THE CRISIS                                         42

III. THE "ÉTUDES DE LA NATURE"                            87

 IV. PAUL AND VIRGINIA                                   149

  V. WORKS OF HIS OLD AGE--THE TWO MARRIAGES--DEATH
       OF BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE--HIS
       LITERARY INFLUENCE                                179




PREFACE.


The life of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is so unusual, so interesting,
so suggestive and amusing, that the grumpiest of Anglo-Saxons need
not complain of the fact that no series of Great French Writers would
be complete which did not contain the name of the author of "Paul and
Virginia." Even "Shakespeare's heirs" must accept the judgment of other
nations about their own authors. Our duty is to comprehend a verdict we
are powerless to upset. Dorian women, as Gorgo says in the famous ode
of Theocritus, have a right to chatter in a Dorian accent, and a great
French writer is not necessarily the worse for a strong infusion of
French sentiment.

Saint-Pierre was no ordinary person, either as man or author. His
was a strong and original character, more bent on action than on
literature. Though a master of style and a great painter in words, he
was ever a preacher, a _sermonneur_, as Sainte-Beuve calls him. His
masterpiece--as the French reckon "Paul and Virginia" to be--came by
chance, and is but a chapter in a huge treatise, a parable told by the
way in a voluminous gospel. It is as if Ruskin's _chef d'oeuvre_ were a
novelette, or as if Carlyle's story had been a perfect whole, instead
of a fragment and a failure.

To understand "Paul and Virginia" aright, one should read the "Études
de la Nature," first published in 1784. Our grandparents read them
greedily enough, either in the original or in the excellent translation
of Dr. Henry Hunter, the accomplished minister of the Scots Church,
London Wall. A hundred years have, however, pressed heavily upon these
Studies, but to this day a tender grace clings to them. Even so will
our own descendants in 1984 turn the pages of Ruskin and inhale a stray
whiff of the breath which once animated a generation.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was as obstinate a theorist as ever lived,
and his theory was that Providence had fashioned the whole world with
one intent only, namely, the happiness of man. That man was not happy,
Saint-Pierre sorrowfully admitted; but there was no reason whatever,
save his own folly, why he should not be as happy as the days were
long. Nothing could shake this faith of Saint-Pierre's. The terrible
catastrophes of life--plague, pestilence, and famine, earthquakes and
shipwreck--counted with him as nothing. That sombre view of human
affairs which so oppressed with gloom the great mind of Bishop Butler,
and drove the lighter but humaner spirit of Voltaire into a revolt
half desperate, half humorous, never affected the imagination of
Saint-Pierre, who none the less had a tender heart, had travelled far
by land and sea, and often had laid down his head to rest with the poor
and the miserable.

Walking once in the fertile district of Caux, he has described how he
saw something red running across the fields at some distance, and
making towards the great road. "I quickened my pace and got up in time
enough to see that they were two little girls in red jackets and wooden
shoes, who, with much difficulty, were scrambling through the ditch
which bounded the road. The tallest, who might be about six or seven
years old, was crying bitterly. 'Child,' said I to her, 'what makes you
cry, and whither are you going at so early an hour?' 'Sir,' replied
she,'my poor mother is very ill. There is not a mess of broth to be
had in all our parish. We are going to that church in the bottom to see
if the Curé can find us some. I am crying because my little sister is
not able to walk any farther.' As she spoke, she wiped her eyes with a
bit of canvas which served her for a petticoat. On her raising up the
rag to her face, I could perceive she had not the semblance of a shift.
The abject misery of the children, so poor in the midst of plains so
fruitful, wrung my heart. The relief which I could administer them was
small indeed. I myself was then on my way to see misery in other forms."

These woebegone little figures scrambling across a great French ditch
in search of broth attest the tenderness of Saint-Pierre's heart, whose
descriptions are free from all taint of affectation and insincerity. He
has neither the leer of Sterne nor the affected stare of Chateaubriand.
He had, however, a theory which was proof against all sights and
sounds. The great earthquake of Lisbon is reported to have made many
atheists, and certainly no event of the kind has ever so seized hold
of men's imaginations. Saint-Pierre brushes it contemptuously on one
side. Says he in his Seventh Study: "The inhabitants of Lisbon know
well that their city has been several times shattered by shocks of
this kind, and that it is imprudent to build in stone. To persons
who can submit to live in a house of wood, earthquakes have nothing
formidable. Naples and Portici are perfectly acquainted with the fate
of Herculaneum. After all, earthquakes are not universal; they are
local and periodical. Pliny has observed," etc.

And so he works his way through the long list of human miseries.
Tigers, indeed! Who need care for tigers? Have they not dusky stripes
perceptible a great way off on the yellow ground of their skin? Do not
their eyes sparkle in the dark? How easy to avoid a tiger! With all the
enthusiasm of a theorist, he heaps up his authorities for statements
great and small, and levels his quotations from all and sundry at
his reader's head, much after the fashion of Mr. Buckle. Of a truly
scientific spirit these Studies have not a trace, but they contain much
attractive and delightful writing, and, though dominated by a fantastic
and provoking theory, are full of shrewdness and wisdom as well as of
lofty eloquence.

Thus, whilst combating what he conceives to be the error of supposing
that morality is determined by climate, he points out that there is as
much difference in manners, in opinions, in habiliments, and even in
physiognomy, between a French opera actor and a Capuchin friar as there
is between a Swede and a Chinese, and concludes by observing: "It is
not climate which regulates the morality of man; it is opinion, it
is education, and such is their power that they triumph not only over
latitudes, but even over temperament."

Saint-Pierre's views on governments and supreme authority are worth
reading, even after a course of Bodin or Hobbes. He says in the same
Seventh Study:--

"Without paying regard to the common division of governments into
democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, which are only at bottom
political forms that determine nothing as to either their happiness
or their power, we shall insist only on their moral constitution.
Every government of whatever description is internally happy and
respectable abroad when it bestows on all its subjects their natural
right of acquiring fortune and honors, and the contrary takes place
when it reserves to a particular class of citizens the benefits which
ought to be common to all. It is not sufficient to prescribe limits
to the people, and to restrain them within those limits by terrifying
phantoms. They quickly force the person who puts them in motion to
tremble more than themselves. _When human policy locks the chain round
the ankle of a slave, Divine Justice rivets the other end round the
neck of the tyrant._"

Nor is there much amiss with Saint-Pierre's political economy.

"It has always appeared to me strangely unaccountable that in France,
where there are such numerous and such judicious establishments, we
should have ministers of superintendence in foreign affairs, for war,
the marine, finance, commerce, manufactures, the clergy, public
buildings, horsemanship, and so on, but never one for agriculture. It
proceeds, I am afraid, from the contempt in which the peasantry are
held. All men, however, are sureties for each other, and, independently
of the uniform stature and configuration of the human race, I would
exact no other proof that all spring from one and the same original.
It is from the puddle by the side of the poor man's hovel which has
been robbed of the little brook whose stream sweetened it the epidemic
plague shall issue forth to devour the lordly inhabitants of the
neighboring castle."

But I must stop my quotations, which have been made only because by
their means better than by any other the English reader can be made
to perceive the manner of man the author of "Paul and Virginia" was,
and how it came about that he should write such a book. Saint-Pierre
was a missionary. He longed to convince the whole world that he was
right, and to win them over to his side and make them see eye to eye
with him. Hence his fervor and his force. He had not the genius of
Rousseau, with whom he had some odd conversations, but by virtue of his
wondrous sincerity he has an effectiveness which vies with the charm
of the elder and greater writer. There is an air of good faith about
Saint-Pierre. Though he deliberately sets to work and manufactures
descriptions, he seems to do so with as much honesty of purpose and of
detail as Gilbert White made his famous jottings in the parsonage of
Selborne.

Of "Paul and Virginia" little need be said. It is a French classic, by
the same title as "Robinson Crusoe" is a British one. Defoe has made
English boys by the thousand want to be shipwrecked, and Saint-Pierre