Modern Frenchmen. Five biographies

Preface To The American Edition

r I ^HERE are some curious passages in the Life of Harriet Martineau, which may throw light on a subject very closely connected with the present volume. When Miss Martin eau's reputation was established, and she had given up novel-writing, Charlotte Bronte persuaded her to try her hand once more upon a story which was to be published anonymously by Smith & Elder. The novel was begun, and the manuscript of the first volume sent to Mr. George Smith, who received it warmly, and predicted a great success ; but, as the work advanced a little further, he declined the publication altogether, on the ground that it was favorable to Roman Catholics. The story must be true, as the biography which contains it was issued by the publishing firm in question. There is also a story about Charles Dickens of a very similar character. Miss Martineau had written a tale for " Household Words," but Dickens declined it on the ground that one of the characters was a priest and yet a good man, a combination which he considered inadmissible, because it might help the influence of Romanism.

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I suppose neither Mr. George Smith nor Charles Dickens would have published the present volume. They acted upon a principle which is often tacitly accepted as a rule of conduct, but very seldom avowed openly, — the principle that it is an error in policy to recognize in any way the merits of those who differ from us.

If mankind were really and hopelessly in a state of war, in which all justice, truth, and honor were permanently suspended, and life had but a single purpose, to do the enemy as little good and as much injury as possible, then, of course, in a conflict where the pen is the best weapon, it would be the error of a dupe to use it to the enemy's advantage. The proper course in such a warfare would be to avoid with the greatest care any recognition of an opponent's merits, to exhibit his errors and failings in a light at once odious and absurd, to give him credit for no motive that could do him honor, to ascribe his actions to the basest self-interest, and to deface whatever beauty might adorn his character. This is constantly and habitually done in the ruthless antagonism of low controversy, where justice is avoided as carefully as generosity, and the object of the speaker or the writer is to injure, by fair means or by foul, all sects and parties but his own.

Such a temper and such conduct as those which I have just been describing are not at all repugnant to the ordinary instincts of mankind : they are, indeed, only too perfectly human. The natural instinct of a man is to do what harm he can to his opponent, even when the op-

Preface to the American Edition. v

position is simply religious, political, or intellectual, and is free from the antipathies of race. The notion of justice is quite foreign to this primitive human instinct : the idea of sympathy with those who differ from us is of still later growth ; and yet, without sympathy, justice itself must be cold and incomplete. Imagine an attempt to give an account, without sympathy, of such a character as that of Henri Perreyve ! He lived habitually in a condition of very pure and elevated sentiment ; and, if you refuse your sympathy to the sentiment, you cannot describe the man, you cannot even understand him. I may be asked how I can feel sympathy with sentiments not my own. The answer is easy. The sentiments, if not exactly my own, may be much nearer to mine than the intellectual condition which accompanied them. Perreyve and I would heartily agree in the love of truth, in the sense of satisfaction in the performance of duty, in the feeling of dissatisfaction when falling short of its full performance, in the admiration for an ideal elevation of character, and the humble desire to gain a little of such elevation for ourselves. We should heartily agree in an unfeigned contempt for all worldly advantages in comparison with the far higher pleasure of fulfilling our own vocation, we should be equally willing to do loyal service when the claim upon our time and effort was undeniable. If, after this, we went further, to the application of these general principles, we should immediately encounter those differences which are the result of circumstances and of intellectual situations. Though at one in the love of truth, we should not be vi Preface to the American Edition.

of the same opinion as to what was historically true ; though, agreed in the desire to do our duty, we should differ about the question, In what does duty consist ? We should alike have a reverence for the ideal, but should discover on comparison that our ideals were not identical. To take a single example, our opinions about the mother of Jesus. For Perreyve, she was the queen of the Sciences, a supernaturally lucid intelligence, to whom science and art were open without an effort ; for me, she possessed whatever science and art may have been accessible to the popular mind in her time and country. No reliable information has reached me about any exceptional scientific knowledge in the wife of Joseph the carpenter ; and, in my complete ignorance on the subject, I conclude that she probably knew very much what was known to others of her sex and country and class. Again, Perreyve speaks elsewhere of her extraordinary beauty. I know nothing about this except from Raphael, and I know that Raphael drew from Roman models whom he deliberately idealized. Am I, then, to apply to Perreyve that familiar alternative of "knave or fool" which men apply so easily to those who think differently from themselves ? Certainly not. Perreyve's idealization of Mary is nothing but an extreme instance of what we see every day, — the common tendency of human nature to attribute all imaginable merits to an object of admiration ; and the less men really know about the object, the more liberally will their imaginations adorn it. Such an idealization is compatible not only with soundness of mind, but with brilliant intellectual power:

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indeed, it is probable that there is hardly a single intellectual man now living in the world who has not in this way idealized some woman, more or less, by attributing to her a degree of intelligence and a range of information considerably beyond her real capacity and acquirements. This is what I desire to insist upon. We are all idealists more or less in some corner of our brains, and we ought to be able to bear with the idealisms of others. Compare the real Queen Victoria with the ideal ! The real person, in this instance, is a lady of high culture and irreproachable character, anxious to do what is right ; but there are many other ladies in England of whom this may be said, and whose characters excite no enthusiasm whatever. The enthusiasm inspired by Queen Victoria, and by all good and many bad sovereigns in monarchical countries, is due to the idealizing tendency of the human mind, and to nothing whatever else. Nay, it is not even necessary that there should be, or have been, a living human being to be clothed with the splendors of the ideal. A mere mental conception has often done equally well. The gods of Greece were simply mental conceptions, and yet the Greek enthusiasm about them was so very much in earnest that it went ill with those who spoke lightly of these imaginary beings and their attributes, and to incur the suspicion of scepticism about the reality of these popular conceptions exposed a Greek to the terrible accusation of impiety. Even in our own day, we see many Frenchmen renounce the monarchical ideal, which transfigures a crowned human being, for the idealization of a mere mental conception called la viii Preface to the American Edition.

Re'publique, a conception which the sculptors are set to realize in colossal statues, and which already exists as a mighty imaginary woman, from whom all good things are to be expected, in the fanciful brain of the people.

I can imagine some very earnest Protestant telling me that I am a dupe in praising a Roman Catholic priest, because the Church of Rome is the sworn foe of that which is dearest to a man of letters, — the liberty of thought and expression.

The answer is that, by cultivating the love of justice in the public mind, of justice towards all, including priests of every denomination, a writer is in fact rendering the best service to liberty of thought, because that condition of public opinion which has accepted the idea of justice as the director of its influence is the best of all possible safeguards against sacerdotal tyranny. Again, it is only in complete ignorance of history that we can look upon the Roman Catholic priesthood as the one great danger to mental freedom. Some of the most intolerant laws that ever disgraced a statutebook have been passed by Protestant parliaments. The English Conventicle Act, which punished by fine, imprisonment, and transportation, all meetings of more than five persons for any religious worship but that of the prayer-book, was passed by a Parliament whose Protestantism had been amply vindicated only twelve months before by the banishment of all Roman Catholic priests. This single instance may suffice ; but the history of the last three hundred years abounds in evidence that the spirit of intolerance has not been confined to

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any particular sect. To be incessantly anxious about the encroachments of one, and careless about the influence of all others, would be the mistake of a general who thinks only of a single outpost when he is threatened in flank and rear.

Surely, the world is old enough by this time to have got over the first violent instinct of antagonism which a difference of opinion would arouse to unreasoning animosity. Surely, people may now endure to hear the simple truth, often the beautiful truth, about those who are divided from them by the barriers of usage, nationality, and tradition !

A biography is like a painted picture : it ought not to be a coarse, rough sketch, or a caricature. If the painter feels some admiration for his subject, the result will be the better for his admiration, provided that it is not strong enough to overcome his judgment. He should be able to recognize, and willing to represent, whatever is really characteristic of his hero with the simple clearness of a conscientious artist. He should state opinions fairly, but it is not his business to controvert them ; he should not pass in silence the errors or failings of his subject, but it is not his business to excite public odium against them. I have compared the work of the biographer to that of the painter, but it may frequently bear a nearer resemblance to the humbler employment of the picture-cleaner. There may be cases when his duty is not so much to paint a new picture as to make one that has been already painted more clearly visible, by removing what obscures it, whilst reverently x Preface to the American Edition.

respecting and carefully preserving those delicacies of tone and detail, those thin glazes of transparent or semitransparent color, on which both its beauty and its truth depend. This is not to be done by scraping down to the bare canvas, and it is not to be done by daubing additions ; but it may be accomplished by method and patience, united to watchful care.

Of the men whose lives are narrated in this volume, three died young, — one passed middle age, and one reached old age in the plenitude of his faculties. The old man, the sculptor Rude, is, in my opinion, by far the greatest man of the five, and perhaps the only one to whom greatness may be properly attributed, but all the five are men of power and energy and of high character, and they have all had influence on the present generation, which is more closely and immediately felt than that of the distant immortals, and which is far from being exhausted. In giving to Rude alone the epithet great, in the highest sense, I ought to add that one or two others of my subjects would probably have deserved it, had they lived beyond middle age. Victor Jacquemont, with his indomitable energy and industry, and the wonderful acuteness of his intellectual faculties, would almost inevitably have attained to indisputable greatness .in science ; and Henri Regnault, with his strong memory, keen observation, and evident manual power, might have taken a great rank in art, equivalent, possibly, to the rank of Eugene Delacroix. Perreyve was evidently not a man of great intellect, and I do not see that he had the greatness of religious power and leadership as Lacordaire

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had it, for example, or even as John Henry Newman undoubtedly has it still; but the influence of his character, with its remarkable purity and singleness of purpose, may be wider than that of greatness- itself. It is doing good still in two very different ways : it is detaching many Roman Catholics from the political reaction and making them more tolerant, both towards Protestantism and towards free thought; whilst, on the other hand, it has won the respect of many outside the Church, and made them less indisposed to recognize what is really good in her. Such characters, when they happily become influential, are like oil upon the tempestuous waters of religious and political animosity, and, if they were more numerous, we might reasonably hope for a future in which the different religious communities might pursue their various ideals in peace, alike protected by the secular power, whilst those who are unable to attach themselves conscientiously to any one of them might lead lives unembittered by contumely, and devote themselves, like Rude, to the austere duties of home and family ; or, like Jacquemont, to science and humanity ; or, like Henri Regnault, to their country in her need.

R G. H.

Preface To The English Edition

TN selecting the subjects of these five short biographies, I have been guided chiefly by feelings of personal interest, from a belief that when the writer is interested there is always some probability that the reader will be so too. I do not intend to convey an indirect lesson against international injustice, being fully persuaded that the old British scorn of Frenchmen, and of all foreigners whatever, is now dying out of itself, and giving place to an intelligent desire to know something accurately about them. Such men as those whose lives are narrated here are certainly worth attention, especially for one characteristic which is common to all of them, and which gives a certain unity to my book, I mean vigor and intensity of life. They may be sometimes misdirected, but they never become dull, languid, or indifferent : they work with all their intelligence, they love with all their hearts, and they keep their bodily powers in full activity, not the activity of the athlete, but of the gentleman. My five modern Frenchmen are, I am well aware, superior to the average of their countrymen, and it is probable that no country or city which xiv Preface to the English Edition.

ever existed has ever brought its average citizens up to this level, or to any thing approaching it ; but at the same time I may add that my little list of five does not by any means exhaust the catalogue of modern Frenchmen whose lives I would willingly write. It would be easy to compose another volume about other modern Frenchmen not inferior to these ; and amongst living men, too modest to look for any thing like notoriety, I have very frequently recognized qualities which belong to my present heroes, — the simplicity of Rude, the fire of Henri Regnault, the industry of Ampere, the sociability of Victor Jacquemont, the purity of Perreyve. These qualities may, I think, be increased to some extent in ourselves by the study of those lives in which they shone with a more than ordinary lustre, and it may be an acceptable service to make such*lives more generally known.

I may add, with regard to materials, that my biographies are founded, wherever possible, on letters ; and, when these were wanting, on accounts furnished by near friends of the subject. In the cases of Jacquemont and Ampere, the letters were delightfully abundant ; in that of Rude, they were unfortunately rare. In all cases alike, I have been careful to sift and compare my materials, and believe that the strict accuracy of the narratives may be relied upon.