Chapter XXI
Jerome of Saint-Quirin had made good his retreat upon the farm-house.
"Who goes there?" cried the sentries, as the party approached.
"People of the village of Charmes," replied Marc-Dives in his voice of thunder.
They were recognized and allowed to pass.
The house was silent; a sentinel with shouldered arms paced in front of the barn, where thirty partisans were sleeping upon the straw. Catherine, at sight of the great dark roofs, the old sheds, the stables, the ancient dwelling where her youth had passed, where the peaceful and laborious lives of her father and her grandfather had tranquilly glided away, the home which she was perhaps about to leave for ever, felt a terrible pain at her heart; but she spoke not of it, and springing from the sledge, as she had often done before on her returning from market, she said:
"Come, Louise, we are home at last; thanks to God."
Old Duchene had pushed open the door, crying,
"It is Madame Lefevre!"
"Yes, it is we. Any news from Jean-Claude?"
"No, madame."
Then every one entered the huge kitchen.
A few coals yet glowed upon the hearth, and, under the immense, overhanging chimney-piece, Jerome of Saint-Quirin was seated in the shadow, in his great-coat; his long-pointed red beard hanging on his breast; his thick staff between his knees, and his rifle leaning against the wall.
"Ha! good morning, Jerome!" cried the old woman.
"Good morning, Catherine!" answered the grave and solemn chief of Grossmann. "You come from Donon?"
"Yes. Things are going ill there, my poor Jerome. The Kaiserliks attacked the farm-house when we left the plateau. We could see only white coats on every side. They began to cross the abatis--"
"Then you think Hullin will be forced to abandon the road?"
"It is possible, indeed, if Pivrette does not come to his assistance."
The partisans had neared the fire. Marc-Dives bent over the coals to light his pipe; as he rose, he cried:
"Jerome, I ask only one thing of you; I know that they fought well where you commanded--"
"They did their duty," interrupted the shoemaker; "sixty men lie stretched on the side of Grossmann, who will bear witness to it on the judgment-day."
"Yes; but who guided the Germans? They never could find of themselves the pass of Blutfeld."
"It was Yegof--the fool Yegof," replied Jerome, and his gray eyes, surrounded with deep wrinkles and thick white lashes and brows, glittered through the darkness.
"Are you very sure of it?"
"Labarbe's men saw him ascend, leading the others."
{747}
The partisans gazed at each other with angry looks.
At the same moment, Doctor Lorquin, who had remained without to unharness his horse, pushed open the door, crying:
"The battle is lost! Here are our men from Donon. I have heard Lagarmitte's horn."
It is easy to imagine the feelings with which this news was received. Every one thought of parent, friends, whom perhaps he was never more to see, and all who were in the kitchen and the barn rushed at once to the fields. Then Robin and Dubourg, posted as sentries, cried:
"Who goes there?"
"France!" replied a voice.
And despite the distance, Louise, recognizing her father's voice, would have fallen had not Catherine supported her.
Presently a great number of steps echoed upon the frozen snow, and Louise, no longer able to contain herself, cried in a trembling voice:
"Father Jean-Claude!"
"I am coming," replied Hullin; "I am coming."
"And my father?" cried Frantz, rushing to the sabot-maker.
"He is with us, Frantz."
"And Kasper?"
"He has received a little wound, but it is nothing: you will see them both."
Catherine threw herself into Hullin's arms.
"O Jean-Claude! what a happiness it is to see you again!"
"Ay," replied he in a low tone; "there are many who will never again see those they love."
"Frantz!" cried old Materne; "hallo! this way."
And on all sides, in the darkness, men sought each other, pressed each other's hands and embraced. Others called aloud for "Vielau" or "Sapheri," but no voice replied.
Then the calls grew hoarse, strangled, and finally ceased. The joy of some and the grief of others were in horrible contrast. Louise wept hot tears in Hullin's arms.
"Ah! Jean-Claude," said Mother Lefevre; "you have much to learn of your daughter. Now I will tell you nothing, but we were attacked--"
"Yes, we will talk of it by and by. Time presses," interrupted Hullin. "The Donon road is lost; the Cossacks may be here at daybreak, and we have yet many things to do."
He entered the farm-house. All followed. Duchene had just thrown a fagot upon the fire. Those faces, black with powder, but still breathing the fire of battle; those garments, torn by bayonet-thrusts, some of them bloody, advancing from darkness into the full light, offered a strange spectacle. Kasper, whose handkerchief was bound around his forehead, had received a sabre-cut; his bayonet, blouse, and high blue cloth gaiters were stained with blood. Old Materne, thanks to his imperturbable presence of mind, came safe and sound from the fray. The remnants of the two troops of Jerome and Hullin were thus united. They showed the same fierce countenances, animated by the same energy and desire for vengeance, save that the last, worn-out with weariness, sat wherever they might find room--on the fagots, the hearth--with their heads bowed upon their hands, and their elbows resting on their knees. The others looked around, unable to realize that Hans, Juson, Daniel, had disappeared for ever, and exchanging questions followed by long periods of silence. Materne's two sons held each other by the arms, as if each feared he would lose his brother, and their father, behind them, leaning against the wall, gazed on with looks of delight.
{748}
"They are there; I see them," he seemed to say. "And they are famous fellows, and both have escaped." The good man coughed, and when some one came to speak to him about Pierre, or Jacques, or Nicolas--of a son or a brother--he replied at random, "Ay, ay, there are a good many stretched out yonder; but what would you have? War is war. Your Nicolas did his duty. Be consoled." And then he thought, "My boys are out of the scrape, and that is the principal thing."
Catherine set the table with Louise. Soon Duchene, returning from the cellar with a cask of wine upon his shoulder, placed it on the sideboard. He opened it, and each of the partisans presented his glass, or cup, or pitcher, to the purple fountain, which gave back the leaping flames on the hearth in a thousand reflections.
"Eat and drink!" cried the old mistress of the house. "All is not yet ended; you will yet need strength. Frantz, hand me down those hams. Here are bread and knives. Be seated, my children."
Frantz, with his bayonet, roasted the hams at the fire.
Benches were brought forward; the men sat down, and ate with that keen appetite which neither present grief nor thought of future evil can make mountaineers forget. But all this did not keep sorrow from the hearts of these brave fellows, and sometimes one, sometimes another, would stop, drop his fork, and leave the table, saying,
"I have had enough."
While the partisans thus recruited their strength, their chiefs met in the neighboring hall to make their last determinations relative to the defence. There were seated round the table, lighted by a tin lamp, Doctor Lorquin--his great dog Pluto near him, watching with uplifted muzzle; Jerome in the recess of a window to the right; Hullin at the left, very pale. Marc-Dives, with his elbow on the table and cheek resting in his hand, sat with his back to the door, and showed only his brown profile and one of the ends of his long moustache. Materne alone was standing, as was his habit, leaning against the wall behind Lorquin's chair, his rifle resting upon his foot. A murmur of voices came from the kitchen.
When Catherine, who was called by Jean-Claude, entered, she heard a sort of groan which made her tremble. It was Hullin speaking.
"Do you think," he cried, in a burst of wild grief, "that the fate of those brave sons, those white-haired fathers, moved not my heart? Would I not gladly have died a thousand times that they might live? You know not the woes with which this night has overwhelmed me. To lose life is but little; but to bear alone the burden of such a trust!"
He was silent, but his trembling lip, the tear that coursed slowly down his cheek, showed how heavily that trust weighed upon him, in a position where conscience itself hesitates and seeks support. Catherine noiselessly seated herself in the large arm-chair on his left. After a few moments' pause, Hullin proceeded more calmly:
"Between eleven o'clock and midnight, Zimmer came crying that we were turned; that the Germans were coming down from Grossmann; Labarbe was crushed; Jerome could hold out no longer. He said no more. What was to be done? Could I retreat--abandon a position which had cost us so much blood--the Donon road, the way to Paris? I were a wretch indeed to do so; but I had only three hundred against the four thousand at Grandfontaine, and I know not how many descending the mountain. {749} But cost what it might, I determined to hold out; it was our duty to do so. I thought that life is nothing void of honor; we might all die, but never would it be said that we yielded the road to France! Never, never, never!"
His voice again trembled, and his eyes filled with tears as he added:
"We held it--for more than two hours--my brave boys held it. I saw them fall; they died crying, 'God save France!' When the battle began, I sent word to Pivrette. He, with fifty men, came up--too late! too late! The enemy flanked us right and left; they held three fourths of the plateau, and we were driven among the firs toward Blanru, their fire crashing into our bosoms. All that I could do was to collect the wounded who could yet drag themselves along, and place them under the escort of Pivrette; a hundred men joined him. I kept only fifty to occupy Falkenstein. We cut through the Germans, who tried to cut off our retreat. Happily the night was dark, otherwise not one of us would have escaped. We are here, and all is lost. Falkenstein alone remains, and we are reduced to three hundred. Now we must try who will dare the bitter end. I tell you that my burden presses heavily upon me. While the Donon road was to be defended, our duty was clear; every man's life belonged to his country: but that road is lost; ten thousand men would be needed to regain it, and even now the enemy are entering Lorraine. What is to be done?"
"Resist to the last!" replied Jerome.
"To the last!" repeated the others.
"Is this your counsel, Catherine?" asked Hullin.
"Ay!" cried the old woman, with a glance of unconquerable determination.
Then Hullin, in firmer tones, laid his plan before them:
"Falkenstein is our point of retreat. There is our arsenal; there are our munitions; the enemy knows this, and will attempt to storm it. We must all be there to defend it; the eyes of all our countrymen must see us; they will say that Catherine Lefevre, Jerome, Materne and his sons, Hullin, Doctor Lorquin, are there; that they will not lay down their arms. This will revive the drooping courage of all who have hearts to feel for their country. Pivrette will remain in the woods; his force increasing day by day. The land will be covered with Cossacks, with robbers of every kind; and when the enemy's army has entered Lorraine, at my signal Pivrette will fling himself between Donon and the road, and the laggards scattered through the mountains will be caught as in a net. We can also watch our chance to carry off their wagons, harass their reserves; and if fortune favors, as we hope, when those Kaiserliks are beaten by our troops in Lorraine, we can cut off their retreat."
All rose, and Hullin, entering the kitchen, made this simple speech to the mountaineers:
"My friends, we have determined to resist to the last. Nevertheless each one is free to do as he pleases, to lay down his arms and return to his village; but those who seek vengeance will join us! They will share our last morsel of bread and divide our last cartridge."
The old wood-cutter, Colon, rose and replied:
"Hullin, we are all with you; we began the fight together, and together we will end it."
"Ay, ay!" cried every voice.
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"This is your resolution? Then listen! Jerome's brother will take command."
"My brother is dead," interrupted Jerome; "he lies on the side of Grossmann."
There was a moment's silence, and then Hullin continued:
"Colon, you will take command of all who remain, except those who formed the escort of Catherine Lefevre. I retain them with me. You will rejoin Pivrette in the valley of Blanru."
"And our munitions?" cried Marc-Dives.
"I have brought my wagon with me," said Jerome. "Colon can supply himself from it."
"Let them take the sledge too," cried Catherine. "The Cossacks are coming, and they will steal everything. Our people must not go away empty-handed; let them take with them oxen, cows, and goats--everything; for whatever they take is so much won from the enemy."
Five minutes after, the farm-house was a scene of pillage. The sledge was loaded with hams, smoked meats, and bread; the cattle driven from the stables; the horses harnessed to the great wagon, and soon the train began its march, Robin at the head, blowing his horn, and the partisans behind pushing at the wheels. When they had disappeared in the woods, and silence suddenly succeeded the tumult, Catherine, turning round, saw Hullin behind her as pale as a corpse.
"Well, Catherine," he said; "all is finished. We will begin the ascent."
Frantz, Kasper, and the men of the escort, Marc-Dives and Materne, awaited them in the kitchen, resting on their arms.
"Duchene," said the good old woman, "go down to the village; they must not ill-treat you on my account."
The old servant, shaking his white head, replied with eyes full of tears:
"I might as well die here, Madame Lefevre. It is fifty years since I came to this house. Do not force me away; that would kill me."
"As you will, my poor Duchene," answered Catherine, much affected. "Here are the keys of the house."
The old man seated himself on a stool by the hearth, with eyes fixed and lips parted like one in some sad dream.
The others started for Falkenstein. Marc-Dives, on horseback, his long blade hanging from his wrist, formed the rear-guard. Frantz and Hullin, on the left, reconnoitered the plateau, and Jerome, on the right, the valley; Materne and the men of the escort surrounded the women. Strange! At every threshold, at every window of the village of Charmes appeared faces, young and old, gazing with curious eyes at the flight of Mother Lefevre, and evil tongues were not wanting. "Ah! driven from your nest at last," they cried. "You would meddle with what did not concern you!"
Others muttered aloud that Catherine had been rich long enough, and that all had their turn. As for the labor, the wisdom, the kindness of heart, the thousand virtues of the old mistress of Bois-de-Chênes, the patriotism of Jean-Claude, the courage of Jerome and the three Maternes, the unselfishness of Doctor Lorquin, the devotion of Marc-Dives--about all these things no one had a word to say: their owners were beaten!
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Chapter XXII
At the bottom of the valley of Bouleaux, two musket-shots from the village of Charmes, the little troop began slowly to ascend the path leading to the ancient burg. Hullin, remembering how he had taken the same path when he had gone to buy powder of Marc-Dives, could not repress his grief. Then, notwithstanding his visit to Phalsbourg, the sight of the wounded from Hanan and Leipsic, the story of the old sergeant, he despaired not; he kept all his energy alive, and never doubted the success of the defence. But now all was lost; the enemy were descending upon Lorraine, and the mountaineers flying. Marc-Dives rode along the wall in the snow; his great horse, accustomed to the journey, neighing, lifting his head and then dropping it beneath his chest. The smuggler turned from time to time to throw a glance at the opposite field of Bois-de-Chênes. Suddenly he cried:
"Ha! the Cossacks are showing themselves."
At this exclamation the entire party halted to look around. They were already high above the village, and even the farm. The gray winter dawn was scattering the morning vapors, and in the hollows of the mountain side they saw a number of those wild horsemen, pistol in hand, slowly approaching the old house. They were separated like skirmishers, and seemed to fear a surprise. A few moments after, others followed from the valley of Houx, then others, and still others, all alike standing up in their stirrups to see further. The first, passing the farm-house and seeing nothing to fear, flourished their lances and turned half-way round. The rest came up at a gallop, like rooks following one of their number that rises in the air as if perceiving some prey. In a few seconds the farm was surrounded, and the door pushed open. Another minute and the windows flew out, shattered to pieces; furniture, mattresses, linen followed from every side of the house at once. Catherine, with lips pressed tightly together, gazed calmly at all this destruction. For a long while she said nothing; but suddenly seeing Yegof strike Duchene with the shaft of his lance, and drive him from the house, she could not restrain a cry of indignation.
"The wretch! coward! to strike a poor old man who can no longer defend himself. Ah villain! if I had thee here!"
"Come, Catherine," said Jean-Claude; "we have seen enough, and the sight does us no good."
"You are right," she replied; "let us go. I cannot bear it."
As they ascended, the air grew keener. Louise, the child of the gypsies, with a little basket of provisions on her arm, clambered at the head of the troops. The blue sky, the plains of Alsace and Lorraine, and at the verge of the horizon those of Champagne, the boundless immensity of space wherein sight was lost, inspired an enthusiasm in all. They seemed to have wings, to pierce the blue air like those great birds that glided from the tree tops over the abysses, uttering their free and fearless cries. All the wretchedness of the world beneath, its injustice and its suffering, were forgotten. Louise saw herself a child on the back of her mother--that poor wandering gypsy--and thought, "I have never since been happier; never had less of care; never laughed so much, sang so gayly, and yet we often lacked bread. Ah! those dear days gone!" And the words of old songs rang in her ears.
As they neared the great red rock, crusted with its white and black stones, and hanging over the precipice like the tower of some grand cathedral, Louise and Catherine paused in ecstasy. {752} Above, the sky seemed yet deeper; the path cut in the rock yet narrower. The valleys stretching on till lost in distance, the boundless woods, the far-off lakes of Lorraine, the blue ribbon of the Rhine--all the glorious scene filled them with emotion, and the old woman said thoughtfully:
"Jean-Claude, He who lifted this rock to heaven, whose hand hollowed these valleys, who scattered these forests, those thickets, and even these little mosses upon his earth, will surely render us what we deserve."
While they gazed thus, standing upon the forest terrace of rock, Marc had led his horse to a neighboring cavern, and returned on foot, saying, as he climbed before them.
"Be careful; you may slip."
At the same time he showed them, to the right, the blue precipice, with the tops of the fir-trees so far down that they seemed at its base. All were silent until they reached the terrace where the vault began. Then they breathed more freely, and saw in the middle of the passage the smugglers Brenn, Pfeifer, and Toubac, with their great grey cloaks and black slouched hats, seated by a fire which stretched all along the rock. Marc accosted them:
"Here we are! the Kaiserliks are victorious. Zimmer was killed last night. Is Hexe-Baizel above?"
"Yes," answered Brenn; "she is making cartridges."
"They may save us yet," said Marc. "Keep your eyes open, and if any one ascends, fire on him."
The Maternes halted at the edge of the rock, and the three tall men, with their hat-brims turned up, their powder-horns at their sides, their rifles on their shoulders, and their muscular limbs, and feet firmly planted on the point of the rock, stood, a strange group, against the blue of the abyss. Old Materne, with outstretched arm, pointed far, very far away, to an almost imperceptible white spot among the firs, saying:
"Do you recognize that, my boys?"
And all three gazed with half-closed eyes.
"It is our house," replied Kasper.
"Poor Magredel!" said the old hunter; "how uneasy she must have been for the last week; how often has she prayed for us!"
Marc-Dives, who led the party, uttered a cry of surprise.
"Mother Lefevre," said he, stopping short, "the Cossacks have set fire to your house!"
Catherine heard this news calmly, and walked to the edge of the cliff. Louise and Jean-Claude followed her. At the bottom of the abyss stretched a great white cloud, through which shone what seemed like a spark. That was all; but from time to time the breeze blew aside the smoke and the fire appeared; the two high gables, standing darkly out from the flames, the ruined barn and the blazing stables; then all again was hidden.
"It is nearly finished," said Hullin in a low tone.
"Yes," replied the old mistress of the burning dwelling; "forty years of toil and care are there turning to smoke. But no matter; they cannot burn my good lands--my fine meadows of the Eichmath. We will begin to labor once more; Gaspard and Louise will restore all that mischief. I am content. I repent of nothing I have done."
At the end of a quarter of an hour, millions of sparks arose, and all the buildings fell--all save the dark gables. The party again clambered up the path; and as they reached the highest terrace, the sharp voice of Hexe-Baizel was heard:
{753}
"You, Catherine!" she cried "I never thought that you would come to see me in my poor den."
Baizel and Catherine Lefevre had been school-girls together; there was but little ceremony between them.
"Nor I," replied the latter; "but in misfortune one is glad to find a companion of one's childhood."
Baizel seemed touched.
"Whatever is here is yours, Catherine," she cried. "Everything."
She pointed to her poor stool, her broom of green twigs, and the five or six logs on her hearth. Catherine gazed on all in silence for a few moments, and then said:
"They are not very grand, but they are substantial, and the Cossacks will not easily burn your house."
"No, they will not burn it," laughed Hexe-Baizel; "they would need all the trees in the county of Dabo to only warm the walls. Ha, ha, ha!"
The partisans, after many toils and dangers, felt the want of repose. Each man hastened to place his musket against the wall and stretch himself on the floor. Marc-Dives opened the door of the inner cavern for them, where they were at least sheltered, and then sallied forth with Hullin to examine the position.
Chapter XXIII
On the rock of Falkenstein, high in the blue air, rises a round tower, the base of which is broken and sunken. This tower, covered with brambles, hawthorn, and myrtle, seems old as the mountain itself; it has survived French, Germans, and Swedes. Its stones and mortar have become a solid mass, from which it is almost impossible to break the smallest fragment, and the whole structure wears a gloomy air of mystery which bears back the mind to ages long past--ages which have no place in the memories of man. Here was Marc-Dives wont to lie in ambush when the wild geese flew south--if he had nothing better to do; and here sometimes at night-fall, when their flocks pierced the fogs and swept round in a broad circle before going to rest, would he bring down two or three of their number--a feat which rejoiced the heart of Hexe-Baizel, who wasted no time in preparing them for the spit. Here too, in autumn, did Marc often set snares among the bushes, where the thrushes loved to perch; and to crown all, the old tower served him as a storehouse for his winter's stock of wood. How often was Hexe-Baizel, when the northern gales blew fierce, and the crashing of branches and groans of the neighboring forests rose like the dashing of a tempest-tost ocean--how often then was Hexe-Baizel almost torn from that old tower and hurled to the opposite Kilberi! But her long fingers held fast to the vines, and the wind only flapped her coarse hair about her head.
Dives, perceiving that his wood, covered with snow and wet with every rain, gave more smoke than flame, made a roof of planks for his storehouse; and the smuggler relates that, while laying the rafters, he found a screech-owl white as snow, blind and feeble, but provided with field-mice and bats in abundance. For this reason he called it the "Grandmother of the country," supposing that all the other birds fed it on account of its extreme old age.
Toward evening the partisans--placed on the lookout on every terrace of the rock--saw white uniforms appear in the surrounding gorges. Masses of men debouched from the depths on all sides at once, showing an intention to blockade Falkenstein. Marc-Dives seeing this, became thoughtful. "If they surround us," said he musingly, "we cannot procure provisions; we must surrender or die of hunger."
{754}
The enemy's staff were plainly seen on horseback around the spring of the village of Charmes. There a stout officer was observing the rock through a long field-glass; behind him was Yegof, to whom he turned from time to time to question. The women and children of the village looked on at some distance away, as if enjoying the scene, and five or six Cossacks caracoled about. The smuggler could bear no more; he took Hullin aside.
"Look," said he, "at that long line of shakos glistening along the Sarre, and nearer, those others running like hares through the valley. They are Kaiserliks, are they not? Well, what are they going to do, Jean-Claude?"
"They are going to surround the mountain."
"That is clear. How many men do you think they have?"
"From three to four thousand."
"Without counting those in the open country. Well, what would you have Pivrette do with his three hundred men against that mass of vagabonds? I put the question frankly, Hullin!"
"He can do nothing," replied brave Jean-Claude simply. "The Germans know that our munitions are at Falkenstein; they fear a rising after they enter Lorraine, and wish to secure their rear. The enemy's general sees that he cannot overcome us by force; he has decided to reduce us by famine. All this, Marc, is surely true; but we are men; we will do our duty; we will die here!"
There was a moment's silence. Marc-Dives knit his brows, but seemed not at all convinced.
"We will die?" he repeated. "I do not see why we should die; that idea did not enter our heads; there are too many people who would be glad of it if we did."
"What would you do?" asked Hullin shortly; "do you want to surrender?"
"Surrender!" cried the smuggler: "do you take me for a coward?"
"Then explain."
"This evening I start for Phalsbourg. I risk my neck passing through the enemy's lines; but I would rather do that than fold my arms and die of hunger. I will enter the city the first sortie that is made, when I will try and reach a gate. The commandant, Meunier, knows me; I have sold him tobacco for the last three years. He, like you, served in Italy and Egypt. I will show him the state of affairs. I will see Gaspard Lefevre. I will fix matters so that they will probably give us a company. If we only get a uniform, we are saved--do you see, Jean-Claude? All of our brave people who are left will join Pivrette, and, in any case, they can deliver us. That is my idea; what do you think of it?"
He gazed at Hullin, whose fixed and gloomy eye disturbed him.
"Is it not our only chance?"
"It is an idea," replied Jean-Claude at length; "I do not oppose it."
And looking the smuggler straight in the eyes, he said:
"Will you swear to do your utmost to enter the city."
"I swear nothing," answered Marc, his brown cheeks flushing. "I leave here all I possess--my wife, my goods, my comrades, Catherine Lefevre, and you, my oldest friend! If I do not return, I shall be a traitor; but if I return, you will explain, your demand, Jean-Claude; we will clear up this little account between us."
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"Marc," said Hullin, "forgive me. I have suffered too much; I was wrong; misfortune has made me distrustful. Give me your hand. Go; save us; save Catherine; save my child! I say now to you, that our only hope lies in you."
Hullin's voice quivered. Dives softened, but he said:
"Very well, Jean-Claude; but in such a moment you should not have spoken so. Never let us again speak of it! I will leave my body on the way or I will return to deliver you. I will start to-night. The Kaiserliks already surround the mountain. No matter; I have a good horse, and I was always lucky."
At six o'clock darkness had fallen on every peak. Hundreds of fires flashing in the gorges showed where the Germans were preparing their evening meal. Marc-Dives descended, groping his way. Hullin listened for a few seconds to his comrade's footsteps, and then turned, buried in thought, to the old tower, where he had established his headquarters. He lifted the thick woolen curtain which closed the entrance, and saw Catherine, Louise, and the others gathered round a little fire, which lighted up the grey walls. The old woman, seated on an oaken block, her hands clasped around her knees, gazed fixedly at the flame, her lips set tightly together, and her face seemingly tinged with a greenish tint in its extreme pallor. Jerome, standing behind Catherine, his folded arms resting on his staff, touched the slimy roof with his otter-skin cap. All were sad and disheartened. Hexe-Baizel, who was lifting the cover of a great pot, and Doctor Lorquin, scraping the old wall with the point of his sabre, alone kept their accustomed looks.
"Here we are," said the doctor, "returned to the times of the Triboci. These walls are more than two thousand years old. A fine quantity of water must have flowed from the heights of Falkenstein and Grossmann through the Sarre and the Rhine since fire was made before in this tower."
"Yes," replied Catherine, as if awakening from a dream, "and many besides us have here suffered cold, hunger, want. Who knows how many? And when a hundred, or two or three hundred years shall have passed, still others may here seek shelter. They, like us, will find the walls cold and the floor damp. They will make a little fire, and gazing on each other as we now gaze, will ask, Who suffered here before us, and why did they suffer? Were they pursued, hunted as we have been, that they would fain hide themselves in such a miserable den? And then they will think of by-gone years, and no one may answer them!"
Jean-Claude drew near. In a few moments, raising her head she said, as she looked at him:
"Well, we are blockaded; the enemy seeks to reduce us by famine."
"True, Catherine,' 5 replied Hullin. "I did not expect that. I counted on an attack; but the Kaiserliks are not yet so sure of us as they imagine. Dives has just started for Phalsbourg. He knows the commandant; and if they only send a hundred men to our succor--"
"We must not rely on it," interrupted the old woman. "Marc may be captured or killed; and even should he succeed in making his way through their lines, how could he enter Phalsbourg? You know the city is besieged by the Russians."
All remained silent.
Hexe-Baizel soon brought some soup, and the party formed a circle around the great smoking pot.
{756}
Chapter XXIV
Catherine Lefevre came forth from the ruin at about seven o'clock in the morning. Louise and Hexe-Baizel were yet sleeping; but day--the brilliant day of the mountains--already flooded the valleys. Far below, through the blue depths, forests, gorges, rocks, were outlined like the mosses and pebbles of a lake beneath its crystal waters. Not a breath stirred the air, and Catherine, as she surveyed the grandeur of the scene, felt a sense of peaceful calm--of repose, greater even than that of sleep, steal over her. "Our miseries, our unrest, and our sufferings are but of a day," she thought. "Why disturb heaven with our groans? Why dread the future? All these things endure but a moment. Our plaints are as those of a butterfly when the leaves fall; they do not keep winter away. Time must end for all; we must die that we may be born again."
Thus mused the old woman, and she no longer feared what might happen. Suddenly a murmur of voices filled her ears; she turned and saw Hullin with the three smugglers, all earnestly talking, on the opposite side of the plateau. They had not seen her, so deeply did the subject of their conversation interest them.
Old Brenn, at the edge of the rock, with a short, black pipe between his teeth, his cheeks wrinkled like a withered leaf, short nose, grey moustache, bleared eye-lids, half-closed over reddish-brown eyes, and long great-coat sleeves hanging by his sides, gazed at the different points Hullin was showing them among the mountains; and the other two, wrapped in their gray cloaks, stepped forward or backward, shading their eyes with their hands, in deep attention.
Catherine walked toward them, and soon she heard:
"Then you do not think it possible to reach the foot of the mountain?"
"No, Jean-Claude; there is no way of doing so," answered Brenn; "those villains know the country thoroughly, and all the paths are guarded. Look! there is the meadow of Chevreuils along that lake; no one ever even thought of watching it; but see, they are there. And yonder, the pass of Rothstein--a mere goat-path, where a man is scarcely seen once in ten years--you see a bayonet glisten behind the rock, do you not? And there, where I have climbed for eight years with my sacks without ever meeting a gendarme, they hold that too. Some fiend must have shown them the defiles."
"Yes," cried tall Toubac, "the fiend Yegof."
"But," said Hullin, "it seems to me that three or four stout men might carry one of those posts."
"No; they are supported by each other; and the first shot fired would bring a regiment upon us," replied Brenn. "Besides, if we got through, how could we return with provisions? It is impossible!"
There were a few moments of silence.
"Nevertheless," said Toubac, "if Hullin wishes it, we will try all the same."
"Try what?" cried Brenn. "To lose our lives trying to escape, and leave the others in the toils? But it is all the same to me; if the others go, I will. But as for talking about returning with provisions, I say it is impossible. Which path will you take going, and which returning? Promises will not do here; we must act up to them. If you know a way, tell us. For twenty years I have beaten the mountain with Marc. I know every path and pass for ten leagues around; but I see none open now except through the air."
{757}
Hullin turned, and saw Mother Lefevre a few paces away, listening attentively.
"You here, Catherine!" he exclaimed. "Our affairs wear an ugly look."
"Yes; I understand. There is no way of getting a supply of provisions."
"Provisions!" said Brenn, with a strange smile. "Do you know, Mother Lefevre, for how long we are supplied?"
"For a fortnight, at least," replied Catherine.
"For a week," said the smuggler, shaking out the ashes of his pipe on his nail.
"It is true," said Hullin. "Marc-Dives and I believed that an attack would be made on Falkenstein; we never thought the enemy would besiege it like a fortress. We were mistaken."
"And what is to be done?" asked Catherine, growing pale.
"We must reduce each one's ration to half. If Marc does not return in a fortnight, we shall have no more. Then, indeed, we must see what is to be done."
So saying, Hullin with Catherine and the smugglers, their heads drooping, took the path to the notch. They reached the descent, when, thirty feet beneath them, they saw Materne climbing breathlessly among the stones, and dragging himself along by the bushes to increase his speed.
"Well," cried Jean-Claude, "what has happened?"
"Ah! there you are. I was going to look for you. One of the enemy's officers is coming along the wall of the old burg, with a little white flag. He seems to desire a parley."
Hullin, directing his steps toward the slope of the rock, saw, indeed, a German officer standing upon the wall, seemingly awaiting a sign to ascend. He was two musket-shots off, and further away were five or six soldiers, resting on their arms.
After gazing a moment at the group, Jean-Claude turned, saying:
"It is a flag of truce coming to summon us to surrender."
"Fire on him!" cried Catherine; "we have no other answer."
The others all seemed inclined to do so, save Hullin, who, without speaking, descended to the terrace, where the rest of the partisans were gathered.
"My friends," said he, "the enemy sends a flag of truce. We know not what he wants. I suppose it is a summons to lay down our arms; but it may be something else. Frantz and Kasper will go to meet him. They will bandage his eyes at the foot of the rock, and lead him hither."
No one having any objection to make, the sons of Materne slung their carbines on their backs and departed. At the end of about ten minutes the two tall hunters reached the officer; there was a rapid conference between them, after which all three began to climb to Falkenstein. As they ascended, the uniform of the German officer, and even his features, could be clearly seen. He was a lean man, with ashy flaxen hair, tall, well knit, and resolute in movement and appearance. At the foot of the rock Frantz and Kasper bandaged his eyes, and soon their steps were heard beneath the vault. Jean-Claude went to meet them, and himself untied the handkerchief, saying:
"You wish to communicate with me, sir. I am listening."
{758}
The partisans stood some fifteen paces off. Catherine Lefevre, nearer, knitted her brows; her bony figure, long, hooked nose, the three or four locks of gray hair which fell by chance upon her hollow temples, and down on her wrinkled cheeks, her tightly pressed lips, and fixed gaze, seemed first to attract the officer's attention; then the pale and gentle face of Louise behind her; then Jerome, with his long, yellow beard and cloak; and old Materne leaning on his short rifle. He looked at the others, and at the high, red vault, with its colossal mass of granite hanging over the precipice, and covered only with a few brambles. Hexe-Baizel, behind Materne, her long broom of twigs in her hands, her outstretched neck and feet, on the very, edge of the rock, seemed to astonish him.
He himself was the object of much attention. His attitude and bearing, long face, finely-cut bronzed features, clear gray eye and thin mustache, the delicacy of his limbs, hardened by the toils of war, all bespoke aristocratic lineage; and he had, too, a look of shrewdness mingled with that of the man of the world, the soldier, and the diplomatist.
But this mutual inspection was only the work of an instant. The officer began, in good French:
"Is it the Commandant Hullin that I have the honor of addressing?"
"Yes, sir," replied Jean-Claude.
The officer glanced hesitatingly at the circle around.
"Speak out, sir," cried Hullin; "let all hear you. Where honor and our country are the subject, no one in France is out of place; our women understand the words as well as we. You have some propositions to offer me. In the first place, on behalf of whom?"
"Of the general commanding-in-chief. Here is my commission."
"Very good. We are listening, sir."
Then the officer, raising his voice, proceeded in a firm tone:
"Before I begin, commandant, permit me to say that you have performed your duty magnificently; you have forced your foes to admire you."
"As for duty," answered Hullin, "we merely did what we could."
"Yes," added Catherine, in short, dry tones; "and since our foes admire us on that account, they will admire us much more in a week or two, for the war is not yet ended. Marc is to come!"
The officer turned his head toward her, and stood as if stupefied at the savage earnestness imprinted upon the old woman's features.
"Those are noble sentiments," said he, after a few moments' silence; "but humanity has its rights, and to spill blood uselessly is only doing evil for the sake of evil."
"Then why do you come to our country?" cried Catherine, and her voice seemed like the eagle's shriek. "Begone, and let us alone!"
Then she added:
"You make war like robbers: you steal, pillage, burn. You all deserve to be hanged. We ought to throw you over the rock, for the sake of the example."
The officer turned pale, for the old woman seemed ready to execute her threat; but he soon recovered himself, and continued calmly:
"I know that the Cossacks set fire to the farm-house opposite this rock. They are pillagers such as follow all armies, and this one act proves nothing against the discipline of our troops. The French soldiery often did the same in Germany, and particularly in the Tyrol; and, not satisfied with robbing and burning the villages, they shot pitilessly all the mountaineers suspected of having taken up arms to defend their homes. {759} We might make reprisals. It is our right to do so; but we are not barbarians; we understand that patriotism is grand and noble, even when wrongly directed. Besides, we do not make war on the French people, but on the Emperor Napoleon. Therefore, our general, on learning of the conduct of the Cossacks, publicly punished that act of vandalism, and moreover, decided that the proprietor should be indemnified."
"I ask no indemnity of you," interrupted Catherine rudely. "I wish to live with my wrong, and to avenge it!"
The officer saw the hopelessness of trying to bring the old woman to terms, and that it was, besides, dangerous to reply. He turned, therefore, to Hullin, and said:
"I am charged, commandant, to offer you the honors of war, if you consent to surrender your position. You have no provisions, as we are well aware. A few days from now, you will be compelled to lay down your arms. The esteem the general bears you alone impelled him to offer you these honorable conditions. Longer resistance is useless. We are masters of Donon; our corps d'armée is passing into Lorraine. The campaign will not be decided here; so that you have no interest in defending a useless position. We wish to spare you the horrors of famine upon this rock. Decide, commandant."
Hullin turned to the partisans, and said simply,
"You have heard. I refuse the conditions; but I will submit, if all accept the enemy's propositions."
"We all refuse them," cried Jerome.
"Yes; all, all!" repeated the others.
Catherine Lefevre, till then so stern, happened to glance at Louise, and then her firmness gave way. She took her by the arm, and leading her to the officer, said:
"We have a child among us; is there no means of sending her to one of her friends in Laverne?"
Louise had scarce heard the words when, throwing herself in Hullin's arms, she cried affrightedly,
"No, no! I will stay with you, Father Jean-Claude! I will die with you!"
"Go, sir," said Hullin, with bloodless lips, "tell your general what you have seen; tell him that Falkenstein we will hold to the death! Kasper, Frantz, lead back the officer."
The last seemed to hesitate; but as he was about to speak, Catherine, pale with wrath, cried,
"Go, go! You are not yet so sure of us as you think. It is the villain Yegof who told you we had no provisions; we have enough for two months, and in two months our army will have swept you from the earth. Traitors will not always flourish, and then woe to you!"
As she grew more and more excited, the officer judged it prudent to withdraw. He returned to his guides, who again put on the bandage, and led him to the foot of Falkenstein.
Hullin's orders regarding the provisions were carried out the same day; each one received a half-ration. A sentry was posted in front of Hexe-Baizel's cavern, where the food was kept, and the door barricaded. Jean-Claude ordered the distributions to be made in presence of all, to avoid injustice; but all these precautions did not save the unhappy patriots from the worst horrors of famine.
{760}
Chapter XXV
For three days food had been entirely wanting. Still Dives gave no sign. How often during those long days of agony did the mountaineers strain their eyes toward Phalsbourg! How often did they listen to the low murmur of the breeze, thinking it bore upon it the sound of the smuggler's footsteps!
In the midst of the torments of hunger, the nineteenth day since the arrival of the partisans on Falkenstein dragged away. They no longer spoke to each other; but seated on the earth, their fleshless faces gazing at vacancy, they passed hours as in a dream. Sometimes they would turn sparkling eyes upon each other, as if ready to satisfy their hunger at the expense of a comrade's life; then all would again sink into a gloomy calm.
Once Yegof's raven, winging its way from peak to peak, came near this scene of misery; but old Materne brought his rifle to his shoulder, and the bird of ill omen flew back at its utmost speed, uttering mournful cries, and the old hunter's piece fell harmless.
And now, as if the horrors of hunger were not enough to fill the measure of their misery, they only opened their lips to accuse or threaten each other.
Louise was delirious; her great blue eyes, instead of living objects, saw spectres fleeting over them, sweeping the tree-tops, and lighting upon the old tower.
"Food--food at last!" would she cry.
And then the others, carried away by fury, shrieked that she was mocking them, and bade her beware.
Jerome alone remained calm and collected; but the great quantity of snow he had eaten in his pangs kept his body and bony face covered with a cold sweat.
Dr. Lorquin knotted a handkerchief around his waist, and drew it tighter and tighter, pretending that he thus satisfied his cravings. He sat against the wall of the tower with closed eyes, which from hour to hour he opened, saying,
"We are at the first, second, third period. Another day, and all will be over!"
Then he would deliver dissertations on the Druids, on Odin, Brahma, Pythagoras, quoting Latin and Greek, all announcing the approaching transformation of the people of Harberg into wolves, foxes, and all sorts of animals.
"I," he cried, "I will be a lion! I will eat fifteen pounds of beef a day."
But soon recollecting himself, he continued,
"No, I would rather be a man. I will preach peace, brotherly love, justice! Ah my friends! we suffer for our own faults. What have we been doing on the other side of the Rhine for the last ten years? By what right did we place masters over those nations? Why did we not rather exchange thought, feeling, the products of our arts and industry with them? Why did we not meet them as brothers, instead of trying to enslave them? We should have been well received. How they, poor wretches, must have suffered during ten years of violence and rapine! Now they are avenging themselves. God is just. May the malediction of heaven fall on those who divide nations to oppress them!"
After a few moments of excitement like this, he would sink exhausted against the wall, murmuring:
"Bread! only a morsel of bread!"
{761}
Materne's boys, seated among the bushes, their rifles at their shoulders, seemed awaiting the sight of game, which never appeared; but the thought of their eternal resting-place sustained their expiring strength.
A few, in the agonies of fever, accused Jean-Claude of being the author of their misery in bringing them to Falkenstein.
Hullin, with more than human energy, yet came and went, watching all that passed in the valleys, but speaking no word.
Sometimes he would advance to the very edge of the rock, with jaws pressed firmly together, and flashing eyes, to see Yegof seated before a great fire on the meadow of Bois-de-Chênes, in the middle of a troop of Cossacks. Since the enemy's arrival in the valley of Charmes, this had been the fool's constant post; and from it he seemed to gloat over the agony of his victims.
The tortures of hunger in the depths of a dungeon are no doubt terrible; but beneath the open sky, with floods of light pouring down on every side, in view of help, in view of the thousand resources of nature, then no tongue can paint their horrors.
At the end of this nineteenth day, between four and five in the evening, the weather became cloudy; huge masses of gray vapor rose behind the snowy peak of Grossmann; the setting sun, glowing redly like a ball of iron just taken from the furnace, threw a few last gleams through the thickening air. Deep silence reigned on the rock. Louise no longer gave any sign of life; Kasper and Frantz still sat motionless as stones among the bushes. Catherine Lefevre, huddled on the ground, clasping her knees within her withered arms, her features hard and rigid, her hair hanging over her ashy cheeks, her eyes haggard, and lips closed tight as a vice, seemed some ancient sibyl. She no longer spoke. That evening, Hullin, Jerome, old Materne, and Doctor Lorquin gathered around the old woman, that all might die together. They were all silent, and the last glimmer of twilight fell dimly upon the group. To the right, behind a projection of the rock, the fires of the Germans sparkled in the abyss. Suddenly the old woman, starting as from a dream, murmured a few words, unintelligible at first.
"Dives is coming!" she continued in a low tone; "I see him; he sallies from the postern--to the right of the arsenal. Gaspard follows him, and--"
She counted slowly.
"Two hundred and fifty men, National Guards and soldiers. They cross the fosse; they mount behind the demi-lune. Gaspard is talking to Marc. What is he saying?"
She seemed to listen.
"'Hasten! Ay, hasten; never was more need of speed! They are on the glacis!"
There was a long silence; then the old woman, suddenly springing to her feet, rose to her full height, and with arms outstretched, and hair flying wildly about her head, shouted:
"Courage! Strike! kill! kill! kill!"
She fell heavily to the earth.
Her terrible cry had awakened all; it might have awakened the dead. New life seemed breathed into the besieged. Something strange and unearthly seemed to fill the air. Was it hope? life? I know not; but the entire party came crawling up on all fours, like wild beasts, holding their breath that they might listen. Even Louise moved slightly, and raised her head. Frantz and Kasper dragged themselves on their knees, and strange to say, Hullin, casting his eyes toward Phalsbourg, thought he saw the flashes of musketry, as if a sortie were being made.
{762}
Catherine resumed her first attitude; but her cheeks, lately rigid as a marble mask, now quivered, and her eye again grew dreamy. The others listened; their lives seemed hanging on her lips. Thus a quarter of an hour passed, when she again spoke slowly:
"They have passed the enemy's lines; they are hastening to Lutzelbourg; I see them. Gaspard and Dives are in the van with Desmarets, Ulrich, Weber, and our friends of the city. They are coming! they are coming!"
She was again silent. They listened long, but the vision had vanished. Minutes followed minutes that seemed centuries, when at once Hexe-Baizel's sharp voice arose:
"She is a fool! She saw nothing. I know Marc. He is mocking us. What is it to him if we perish! So long as he has his bottle of wine and his dinner, and his pipe after, what does he care? O the villain!"
Then all was silence again, and the wretches whose hearts were for a moment animated with the hope of speedy deliverance, again sank back in despair.
"It was a dream," thought they:
"Hexe-Baizel is right; we are doomed to die of hunger."
Night had fallen. When the moon rose behind the tall firs, shedding her pale light on the mournful groups, Hullin alone watched, although fever was burning his vitals. He listened to every sound from the gorges. The voices of the German sentries called their Wer da! Wer da! as the rounds passed the bivouacs; the horses neighed shrilly, and their grooms shouted. At last, toward midnight, the brave old man fell asleep like the others. When he awoke, the clock of the village of Charmes was striking four. Hullin, at the sound of its far-off vibrations, started from his stupor, opened his eyes, and, while he gazed upward trying to collect his senses, a dim light like the flare of a torch passed before his eyes. Fear seized him, and he muttered:
"Am I going mad? The night is dark, and yet I see torches!"
The flame reappeared; he saw it more clearly; he arose and pressed his hand for some seconds upon his brow. At last, risking a glance, he saw distinctly a fire on Giromani, on the other side of Blanru, flinging its red glare in the sky, and throwing black shadows from the firs on the snow. Suddenly he remembered that it was the signal agreed on between Pivrette and himself to announce an attack; he trembled from head to foot; a cold sweat poured from his forehead, and groping through the darkness like a blind man with arms outstretched, he stammered:
"Catherine! Louise! Jerome!"
But no one answered; and after wandering thus, feeling his way, and often thinking he was moving on when he made not a step, he fell to the ground on his face crying,
"My children! Catherine! They are coming! We are saved!"
There was a dull murmur; it seemed as if the dead were awakening. There was a short peal of laughter. It was Hexe-Baizel, crazed through suffering; then Catherine cried:
"Hullin! Hullin! Who spoke?"
Jean-Claude, overcoming his emotion, shouted in a firmer voice:
"Jerome, Catherine, Materne, all of you! Are you dead? Do you not see yonder fire on the side of Blanru? It is Pivrette coining to our rescue!"
{763}
At the same instant a crash rolled like a tempest through the gorges of the Jaegerthal. The trump of judgment could not have produced a greater effect upon the besieged. At once all were awake and listening.
"It is Pivrette! It is Marc!" cried broken voices, sounding hollow as those of skeletons. "They are coming to save us!"
They tried to rise. Some fell back sobbing; they could no longer weep. A second crash brought all to their feet.
"It is the volley of a platoon!" cried Hullin; "our men are firing by platoon too! We have soldiers in line! Long live France!"
"Mother Catherine was right," said Jerome; "the men of Phalsbourg are coming to help us; they are descending the hills of the Sarre, and Pivrette is attacking by way of Blanru."
The fusillade was, in fact, commencing on both sides at once, toward the meadows of Bois-de-Chênes and the heights of Kilberi.
Then the two leaders embraced, and as they groped about in the darkness, seeking the edge of the rock, the voice of Materne shouted:
"Take care! the precipice is there."
They stopped short, and looked down, but saw nothing; a current of cold air, from the depths beneath, alone told them of their danger. All the surrounding peaks and valleys were buried in darkness. On the sides of the opposite slope, the flashes of the musketry glanced like lightning, now lighting up an aged oak, or the black outline of a rock, or mayhap a patch of heather, covered with forms rushing hither and thither. From the depths, two thousand feet below, rose a confused murmur, the clattering of horse-hoofs, cries, commands. Now the call of a mountaineer--that prolonged shout which flies from peak to peak--rose like a sigh to Falkenstein.
"That is Marc!" said Hullin.
"Yes, it is Marc cheering us," replied Jerome.
The others, near by, with necks outstretched and hands on the edge of the cliff, gazed wistfully. The fire continued with a rapidity which told of the desperation of the fight; but nothing could be seen. How those poor wretches longed for a part in the struggle! With what ardor would they have hurled themselves into the combat! The fear of yet being abandoned--of seeing the retreat of their rescuers--made them speechless.
Soon day began to break; the pale dawn shone behind the dark peaks; a few rays of light fell into the shadowy valleys, and, half an hour after, silvered the mists of their depths. Hullin, glancing through a break in these clouds, at last understood the state of affairs. The Germans had lost the heights of Valtin and the field of Bois-de-Chênes. They were massed in the valley of Charmes, at the foot of Falkenstein, one third of the way up the slope, so that the fire of their adversaries might not plunge from above upon them. Opposite the rock, Pivrette, master of Bois-de-Chênes, was ordering an abatis to be raised on the descent to the valley. He rushed hither and thither, his short pipe between his teeth, his slouched hat pulled down on his ears, and his rifle slung behind him. The blue axes of the wood-cutters glanced in the rising sun. To the left of the village, on the side of Valtin, in the midst of the heather, Marc-Dives, on a little black horse with a trailing tail, his long sword hanging from his wrist, was pointing out the ruins and the old path over which the wood-cutters were wont to drag their trees. {764} An infantry officer and some National Guards in blue uniforms listened. Gaspard Lefevre alone, in advance of the group, leaned on his musket and seemed meditating. His mien told of desperate resolve. At the top of the hill, two or three hundred men, in line, resting on their arms, gazed on the scene.
The sight of the fewness of their defenders chilled the hearts of the besieged; the more so as the Germans, outnumbering them seven or eight to one, began to form two columns of attack to regain the positions they had lost. Their general sent horsemen in every direction with orders, and the lines of bayonets began to move.
"The game is up!" muttered Hullin to Jerome. "What can five or six hundred men do against four thousand in line of battle? The Phalsbourg people will return home, saying, 'We have done our duty!' and Pivrette will be crushed."
All thought the same; but what filled the measure of their despair was to see a long line of Cossacks debouch at full speed into the valley of Charmes, the fool Yegof at their head galloping like the wind, his beard, the tail of his horse, his dog-skin and his red hair streaming behind. He gazed at the rock, and brandished his lance above his head. At the bottom of the valley he spurred toward the enemy's staff. Reaching the general, he made some gestures, pointing to the other side of the plateau of Bois-de Chênes.
"The villain!" exclaimed Hullin. "See! he says Pivrette has no abatis on that side, and that the mountain must be turned."
A column indeed, began its march at once in the direction shown, while another pressed on toward the abatis to mask the movement of the first.
"Materne," cried Jean-Claude, is there no means of sending a bullet after yonder fool?"
The old hunter shook his head.
"None," he answered; "it is impossible; he is not in range."
Even as he spoke, Catherine uttered a wild cry, a scream like that of a falcon.
"Let us crush them!" she shrieked--"crush them as we did at Blutfeld!"
And the old woman, but a moment ago so feeble, seized a fragment of rock which she lifted with both hands; then, with her long gray hair floating in the wind, her hooked nose bent over her compressed and colorless lips, and her wrinkled cheeks rigid as iron, she rushed with firm steps to the edge of the cliff, and the rock cleft the air.
A horrible clamor arose from beneath, through which could be heard the crash of broken branches; then the enormous mass rebounded a hundred feet outward--dashed down the steep slope, again flew out into the open air, down, down, falling full on Yegof, and crushing him at the general's feet! All was the work of a moment.
Catherine, erect on the edge of the cliff, laughed a long, rattling laugh.
Then the others, those phantoms, spectres, as if a new life had been given them, dashed over the ruins of the ancient burg, shrieking:
"Death! Death to the Germans! Crush them as we did at Blutfeld."
Never did eye behold a scene more terrible. Wretches at the gates of the tomb--lean, fleshless as skeletons found again their strength and their courage. They blenched not; each man seized his fragment of rock, hurled it over the precipice, and rushed back to find another, without even waiting to see the effect of the one he had thrown.
{765}
No pen can paint the terror of the Kaiserliks as this storm of rocks dashed down upon their heads. All turned as they heard the crashing bushes and trees, and at first stood gazing as if petrified. Raising their eyes, they saw others, and still others, rushing down, and, above, figures like spectres appear and disappear, hurling missiles of death into the air; they saw around them their crushed and mangled comrades--lines of fifteen or twenty men stricken down at once. A wild cry echoed from the depths of the valley to the peak of Falkenstein, and despite the commands of their leaders, despite the hail of shot that began to pour from right and left upon them, the Germans, careless whither they went, fled anywhere--anywhere to avoid the horrid death that smote them there.
In the thick of the rout, however, the Austrian general succeeded in rallying a battalion and brought it in good order to the village. Calm and collected amid disaster and death, he seemed worthy his high rank. He turned gloomily, from time to time, to gaze on the falling rocks, which still ploughed bloody furrows through his column.
Jean-Claude observed him, and in spite of the intoxication of victory, and the joy of having escaped the horrors of a death by famine, the old soldier could not restrain his admiration.
"Look," he cried to Jerome, "he does as we did on the retreat from Donon and Grossmann. He is the last to retire, and only yields his ground foot by foot. Truly there are brave men of all countries!"
Marc-Dives and Pivrette, witnessing this turn of fortune, descended among the fir-trees to cut off the enemy's retreat; but the effort was in vain. The battalion, reduced one half, formed square behind the village of Charmes, and then retreated slowly up the valley of the Sarre, halting at times, like a wounded and hunted wild-boar turning upon his tormentors, whenever the men of Pivrette or from Phalsbourg pressed them too closely.
Thus ended the great battle of Falkenstein, known among the mountains as the Battle of the Rocks.
Chapter XXVI
Scarcely had the fight ceased, when, toward 8 o'clock, Marc-Dives, Gaspard, and some thirty mountaineers, bearing baskets of food, reached the peak of Falkenstein. What a spectacle awaited them there! The besieged, stretched on the earth, seemed dead. In vain they shook the bodies and shouted in their ears; no answer came. Gaspard Lefevre, seeing his mother and Louise lying motionless with teeth fast locked together, told Marc, in his agony, that unless they recovered he would blow out his brains with his own musket. Marc replied that every one was free to do as he pleased; but that for his part, he would do no such thing on Hexe-Baizel's account. At length, old Colon placed his basket on a stone. Kasper Materne suddenly sighed, opened his eyes, and, seeing the food, began clacking his teeth like a famished fox.
They knew what that meant, and Marc-Dives passed his flask under the nose of each one, which was sufficient to resuscitate them. They wanted to devour all the provisions at once; but Doctor Lorquin had sense enough remaining to warn Marc not to listen to them, for the least excess would be sure death. Each one received, therefore, only a small piece of bread, an egg, and a glass of wine, which restored their powers singularly. Then they placed Catherine, Louise, and the entire party on sleds, and descended to the village.
{766}
Who could describe the enthusiasm and emotion of their friends, when they saw them arrive, more meagre than Lazarus risen from his grave! They were gazed at, embraced, hugged, and every new-comer from Abreschwiller, Dagsberg, Saint-Quirin, or anywhere else, had to repeat the ceremony.
Marc-Dives was obliged twenty times to relate the story of his journey to Phalsbourg. Luck had been against the brave smuggler. After having almost by miracle escaped the bullets of the Kaiserliks, he fell, in the valley of Spartzprod, into the middle of a troop of Cossacks, who robbed him of every thing. Then for two weeks he had to roam about the Russian posts, which surrounded the city, drawing the fire of their sentries and running the risk dozens of times of being arrested as a spy, before he was able to enter the works. Then the commandant Meunier, fearing from the weakness of the garrison, at first refused all help, and it was only at the pressing entreaty of the inhabitants of the city that he at length consented to detach two companies for the purpose.
The mountaineers, listening to this recital, could not cease admiring the courage of Marc, and his perseverance amid so many perils.
"What would you have me do?" asked the tall smuggler of those loudest in their praises. "I only did my duty; would you have me leave my comrades to perish? I knew that the task was not an easy one; those rogues of Cossacks are sharper than custom-house officers; they scent you a league off like crows; but no matter, we got the better of them this time."
At the end of five or six days, all the lately besieged were on their feet again. Captain Vidal, from Phalsbourg, had left twenty-five men at Falkenstein, to guard the ammunition. Gaspard Lefevre was of the number, and the brave fellow came every morning down to the village. The allies had all passed into Lorraine; none were seen in Alsace, except around the fortresses. Soon the news came of the victories of Champ-Aubert and Montmirail; but the evil days had come upon us, and, in spite of the heroism of our army and the Emperor's genius, the Germans and Russians entered Paris.
This was a terrible blow for Jean-Claude, Catherine, Materne, Jerome, and all the mountaineers; but others have related the history of these events; they form no part of our story.
Peace concluded, the old farm-house of Bois-de-Chênes was rebuilt in the spring; wood-cutters, sabot-makers, masons, and all the workmen in the country round lent a hand in the work.
About the same time, the army having been disbanded, Gaspard trimmed his mustache, and his marriage with Louise took place.
The wedding-day was all the heroes of Falkenstein and Donon gathered, and the farm-house received them with open doors, and windows too. Each one brought a present to the couple--Jerome, a pair of little shoes for Louise; Dives, packages of smuggled tobacco for Gaspard; each one according to his means.
Tables were set even in the barns and sheds. How much wine, bread, and meat, how many pies and puddings were disposed of, I know not; but what I do know is that Jean-Claude, filled with gloom since the entry of the allies into Paris, cheered upon that day and sang the old song of his youth as gayly as when he set out, musket on shoulder for Valmy, Jemmapes and Fleurus. {767} The echoes of Falkenstein took up the old patriotic air--the grandest, noblest ever heard by man. Catherine Lefevre beat time on the table with the handle of her knife; and if it be true, as many maintain, that the dead come to listen when we speak of them, our slain must indeed have rejoiced, and the King of Diamonds foamed on his red beard.
Toward midnight, Hullin arose, and addressing the bridegroom and bride said:
"You will have brave children; I will dance them on my knees, and teach them this old song; and then I will follow those who have gone before me."
He embraced Louise, and linking arms with Marc-Dives and Jerome, went to his own little home, followed by all the wedding guests singing their grand old song. Never was a finer night known; millions of stars sparkled in the dark blue sky, and a low murmur arose from the bushes at the foot of the slope where so many brave hearts lay cold. All felt at once rejoiced and sad. At Jean-Claude's door they shook his hand and gave him good night; then, scattering in little parties to right and left, sought their villages.
"Good-night Materne, Jerome, Pivrette, Dives," cried the brave sabot-maker cheerily.
His old friends turned and waved their hats, and said among themselves:
"There are indeed days when it is a joy to be in this fair world. Ah! if there were no pestilence, nor war, nor famine; if men understood, loved, and helped one another; if wrongs and distrust were unknown--what a paradise would be ours!"
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Porter's Human Intellect. [Footnote 281]
[Footnote 281: The Human Intellect; with an Introduction upon Psychology and the Soul. By Noah Porter, D.D., Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics in Yale College. New York: Scribner & Co. 1868. 8vo, pp. 673.]
In returning to consider this elaborate volume more in detail, we would remark that its author has designed it as a text-book for college students in the class of philosophy, and has proceeded, in writing, on the presumption that they for whom he writes have not the slightest knowledge of the subject. Hence his pages are filled with matters which those who have made some proficiency in the science of the human understanding, and are not wholly ignorant of philosophy, properly so called, are already masters of, and which they cannot even read without great weariness of the body, and do not deem it worth their while to read at all. They feel that to be able to understand the author, it is enough to consult his principles and method, and his definitions of the several topics he takes up and discusses. They have neither the patience to read carefully through a huge volume which is, nine-tenths of it, filled with what is for them mere baby-talk. But the author does not, in composing his work, begin by stating and defining his theses, and then proceeding to elucidate and prove them; but attempts to begin where he supposes the infant begins, and proceeds as a learner, not as a master. {768} Consequently, we are compelled to read his book from the beginning to the end, or not be sure of his doctrine on any one point.
It is true, the author sometimes attempts definitions, but they are seldom scientific, rarely embrace his whole thesis, and nothing else, and are pretty sure to mislead the unfortunate reviewer who relies on them. He seldom abides by his own definitions. In one place he defines consciousness a power, and in another he makes it an act. Sense-perception is defined to be the power by which the intellect gains the knowledge of material objects; then we are told that the object perceived is not the material existence, but "a joint product of the material agent and the sentient organism," a psychical transcript of the material object; while in another part of his work we find him denying that what the mind perceives is such transcript, and refuting, by plain and solid reasons, those who maintain that it is. A really scientific definition is a definition per genus et per differentiam; Dr. Porter sometimes gives the genus and forgets the differentia, and sometimes gives the differentia without giving the genus. He also adopts a terminology in many respects not familiar to us, though it may be to others, without the necessary explanation of the terms he uses: and even when the terms he uses are such as we are familiar with, they are used in a sense to which we are not accustomed. We cannot tolerate subject-object, for subject and object are distinct, and stand the one over against the other. The subject in thought is never the object, and the object is never the subject. Grammar teaches so much. Object-object says no more than simply object. Every object is object, and no object is more or less than object. The object is always real; for it is causative, since in the act of thought it resists the subject, and becomes a counter-pressure. We dislike percepts and concepts; for they are intended to imply that they exist, as it were, independent of the subject and the object, and that the product of subject and object may itself be object. We protest earnestly, in the name both of philology and philosophy, against calling existences, which are nothing except by the creative act of God, beings, and still more earnestly against so calling the products of second or third causes. This might pass with the Gentiles, who substituted generation for creation, but is inexcusable in a Christian philosopher. We know the schoolmen did so, but they are not to be commended for it. They speak of ens simpliciter, ens secundum quid, ens reale, and ens possibile, and even of ens rationis, as if being, the creations of being, mental abstractions, and the creations of fancy and imagination could be all of the same genus or placed in the same category! There is a philosophy in language which can never be disregarded without more or less injury to the philosophy of things.
The professor's method and technology render his work exceedingly difficult to be understood without as much study as would be necessary to construct the philosophy of the human mind without it; and therefore if we should happen at times to miss his meaning, he must blame himself. He is far more intent on explaining the processes of the mind in knowing than on setting forth what it knows. These processes have no interest for us; for they really throw no light on the power or fact of knowledge. We want to know what the author means by philosophy, and what is its value, and we therefore want him to speak as the professor, not as the pupil. {769} We have no disposition to waste our time and weary the flesh, even, in reading the mass of stuff which he writes and which tells us nothing we want to know. But enough of this.
The professor divides, not very scientifically, his work into four parts.
Part I. treats of Presentation and Presentative Knowledge; Part II., of Representation and Representative Knowledge; Part III., of Thinking and Thought-Knowledge; and Part IV., of Intuition and Intuitive Knowledge.
He says, p. 77, "The leading faculties of the intellect are three: the presentative or observing faculty, the representative or creative faculty, and the thinking or generalizing faculty. More briefly, the faculty of experience, the faculty of representation, and the faculty of intelligence." But experience is not a faculty; it is the result of the exercise of all our faculties, and a source of intelligence. Intelligence, as a faculty, is the intellect itself; as a fact, it is indistinguishable from experience, which is improperly restricted by some psychologists of the inductive sort to the knowledge of the external world through the senses, but extends to all acquired knowledge, whatever the faculty exercised in acquiring it or the object perceived. The real distinction is not between experience or empirical knowledge and intelligence, but between empirical knowledge or experience and the ideal principles which are given intuitively by the Creator, and neither acquired nor developed by the soul's own action. Distinctions should be real, not arbitrary or abstract.
We are able to know objects of various kinds and sorts, but the knowing is always the same fact, and by the same cognitive faculty, whatever the object known, the order to which it belongs, or the means and conditions of its cognition. The learned professor's division, making four sorts of knowledge, since he makes intuition empirical, or an act of the soul, appears to us, therefore, without any real foundation. All knowledge or actual knowing is presentative, and is in all cases by direct contemplation of the object in the light of ideal intuition. Demonstration only strips the object of its envelopes, removes the prohibentia, and presents it to direct contemplation. In the longest chain of reasoning, each link is, in the empirical sense, intuitively apprehended. The apprehension is always immediate, and the several mental processes serve only to bring the subject and object together, face to face. These processes, however named or whatever their character, never extend the matter of knowledge beyond the objects presented.
The presentative faculty the author subdivides into consciousness and sense-perception. But consciousness is not a presentative faculty, nor a faculty, nor a subdivision of a faculty at all. It is simply the recognition of the soul, as reflected from the object, of herself as subject. At most, it simply presents the subject of the thought. Sense-perception presents only material or sensible objects. The professor's doctrine is then that of Locke, who derives all our ideas from sensation and reflection, and confines all our knowledge to sensibles with the soul and her operations. Reflection only operates on the sense-perceptions without extending the matter of knowledge beyond them. This is pure sensism, which we are somewhat surprised to find held by an eminent professor in Yale College. {770} Does Dr. Porter know his doctrine is sensism, and therefore materialistic? He says, though not truly, we apprehend the soul in consciousness as a spiritual being, but is the soul the only non-sensible he means to assert?
But, as we showed in our former article, the soul recognizes herself only as subject, and therefore only as the correlative of object. She knows her own operations only in the same correlation. Take away the object and you lose the subject or fact of consciousness. This, we fear, the professor does. He defines, p. 131, sense-perception to be "an act of objective knowledge, in which the soul knows and only knows;" but adds, "if the soul knows, it knows some being as its object. But what being does it affirm? We answer, The being which, is the joint product of the material agent and the sentient organism. ... In perception proper we do not know the excitant apart, nor do we know the organism apart, only the result of their joint action. This we know as an object, with which the mind is confronted both as a sentient and as a percipient." But as there can be no thought without the conjunction of the intellective subject and the intelligible object, if the mind does not apprehend 'the material object itself, there can be no such joint product as pretended, and, consequently, no object at all. The object then vanishes, and leaves only the subject, which is, we need not say, pure idealism. As the subject is the correlative of object, and recognizes itself only in thinking the object, if the object vanishes, the subject, too, must vanish, and leave behind it only the sensation transformée of Condillac. But as sensation, however transformed, is still sensation, and as sensations are incapable of standing alone, or of subsisting without the subject, the sensations themselves must go, and nihilism alone remains--the result to which all psychologisms and ontologisms are necessarily tending, and in which Sir William Hamilton says all philosophy necessarily ends, if we may trust a passage which we saw quoted from him not long since in The New Englander, by a Princeton professor, in a striking article on The Present State of Philosophy, in which the writer has well stated the problem presented, but which he neither solves nor attempts to solve; a problem, the solution of which is in the ideal formula, or the real synthesis of principles of things and of science, of which he seems never to have heard.
The professor draws a proper distinction between sensation as feeling and sensation as perception, but we cannot agree with him that sensation as feeling is an affection of the soul. Those psycho-physiologers make a great mistake who call the body "The House I live in." The union of soul and body is too intimate for that. I am not soul, as distinguished from the body, nor am I body, as distinguished from the soul; but I am the union of the two. A General Council defines the soul to be "forma corporis," the informing and animating principle of the body. Yet there is a distinction between them. We can predicate of the one things which we cannot of the other. There is, indeed, no sensation without thought, or an act of the soul; but the sensation itself, as distinguished from the perception, is felt, not merely localized, in the body, not in the soul. When I feel the twinges of the gout, I feel them, not in my soul, but in my toe. We must distinguish two classes of affections, frequently confounded; the one sensible, of the body, the other spiritual, of the soul. {771} The sensible affections or emotions, such as joy and grief, sorrow and delight, pain and pleasure, are of the body animated and informed by the soul. They indeed imitate in the sensible order the affections of the soul, but have in themselves no moral character. Hence, the masters of spiritual life make no account of what is called sensible devotion, and see in it nothing meritorious, and no reason why the soul, in its itinerary to God, should seek it. But very different is the other class, often called by the same name, and which may or may not be accompanied by sensible emotion. This difference is at once understood by all who have learned to distinguish between the love of the senses and the love of the soul, the love Plato meant when he represented the soul, in his fine poetical way, as having two wings, intelligence and love, on which it soars to the empyreum. This love, in one degree, is chivalric love, which the knight cherishes for his mistress whom he worships as a distant star; in a higher degree, it is heroic love, a love that braves all dangers for the beloved, whether friend or country; in a still higher degree, and informed by grace, it is charity or saintly love, with which the saint burns and is consumed as he contemplates the Beauty of Holiness, or "the First Good and the First Fair." This is not sensible love, and its glory is in struggling against the seductions of the senses, or the flesh, and by the grace of God winning the victory over them, and coming off conqueror through Him who hath loved us and given his life for us.
The professor has entered largely into the physiology of the senses, and the joint action of the soul in the fact of knowledge, and the process of the mind in forming what he calls percepts; but as all he says under these heads, whether true or not true, throws no light on the intellectual act itself, we pass it over, and proceed to his Part II., Representation and Representative Knowledge.
"Representation or the representative power," the author says, p. 248, "may be defined in general [that is, the genus] the power to recall, represent, and reknow objects which have been previously known or experienced in the soul. More briefly, it is the power to represent objects previously presented to the mind." Clearly, then, representation adds nothing to the matter previously presented by the presentative power. But the author continues: "It is obvious that, in every act of this power, the objects of the mind's cognition are furnished by the mind itself, being produced or created a second time by the mind's own energy, and presented to the mind's own inspection. It follows that representation, in its very essence, is a creative or a self-active power."
We cannot say that this is obvious to us. The definition of representation given by the author makes it what, in the language of mortals, is called memory; and we have never learned that memory is a creative power, or that in memory the mind creates the objects it remembers. To recall or to reknow is not to create. Even that the soul is self-active--that is, capable of acting from itself alone--is by no means obvious; nay, is impossible, unless we take the soul to be the first cause, instead of merely a second cause; and, even if it were self-active, it would not follow that it creates. God is self-active because self-existent, or being in its plenitude; but he is not necessarily a creator. He has infinite scope for his infinite activity in himself, and he is free to create or not to create as he pleases. {772} That the mind does not in memory create the objects remembered, is evident from the fact that the facts remembered are, as the author himself admits, facts or objects previously known or experienced. The fact of memory, or the fact remembered, is the same fact that was known in presentation, accompanied by the recognition of it as an object previously present and known, and not now known for the first time. There is no creation a second time any more than there was the first time, or when the object was presented.
The professor says, p. 251, "The objects of the representative power are .... mental objects. They are not real things, nor real percepts, but the mind's own creations after real things. They are spiritual or psychical, not material, entities; but in many cases, they concern material beings, being psychical transcripts of them, believed to be real or possible." Does he mean this as a true description of the facts of memory? Probably not. Then his definition needs amending, for it does not include all that he means by representation. His definition includes only memory; but his description includes, beside memory, reflection, fancy, and imagination, things which have nothing in common except the fact that the mind operates in them all on matters which have been previously presented. Reflection and memory are in no sense creative faculties; fancy and imagination are sometimes so called, but even they do not create their own objects. Reflection is the mind operating on the ideal principles re-presented in language, and in their light, on the facts of experience in their synthetic relations with them. Memory is simply, as a faculty, the power to retain and to re-present, more or less completely and distinctly, the facts of experience. Its objects are those facts themselves, not a mental representation or transcript of them. The author confounds re-presenting with representation. In the one, the object previously presented is re-presented, or presented anew; in the other, the object itself is not presented for more elaborate consideration, but a certain mental transcript, image, or resemblance of it, which is the product of the mind fancying or imagining, yet is never its object in correlation with which it acts. This distinction alone upsets the author's whole theory of science, or Wissenschaftslehre, and renders worse than useless more than nine-tenths of his volume. His whole theory is vitiated by confounding representation, in the sense of showing or exhibiting by resemblance or similitude, with the etymological sense, that of re-presenting, and in taking the representation as the object of the soul in the intellectual act, which it never is. Neither reflection nor memory represents, in his sense of the word, the objects previously presented; they only re-present them.
In point of fact, we never know anything by mental representation; for we either know not at all, or we know the thing itself. Representation only replaces the phantasms and intelligible species of the schoolmen, for ever made away with, we had supposed, by the Scottish school of Reid and Hamilton, and the professor himself has given excellent reasons for not accepting them. Plato, indeed, asserts that we know by similitude, but in a very different sense. The idea is impressed on matter as the seal on wax, and the impression is a perfect fac-simile of the idea; and by knowing the impression, we know the idea impressed. But he never made either the idea or the impress of it on matter the product of the mind itself. {773} He makes either always objective, independent of the mind, and apprehensible by it. In other words, he never held that the mind creates the similitude by which it knows, but, at most, only that by observation the mind finds it. The peripatetics never, again, made their phantasms and intelligible species mental creations, or represented them as furnished by the mind from its own stock; but always held them to be independent of the mind, and furnished to it as the means of apprehending the object. If they had referred their production to the mind itself, they would have called the species intellective, not intelligible species. The soul has, indeed, the faculty of representation; but in representing its correlative object, it is not the representation, but the thing, whatever it may be, that it attempts to represent. The product of the mind may be a representation, but the object of the mind is not. In all the imitative arts, as poetry, painting, sculpture, the artist seeks to represent, but operates always in view of that reality of which he produces the representation or resemblance.
The author himself distinguishes memory from representation, though very indistinctly. "Representation," p. 303> "recalls, memory recognizes." Here he uses representation in the sense of re-presenting; for what is recalled is not the mental representation or semblance, but the object itself; so, really, there is no representation in the case, and the professor should not have treated memory under the head of representation. "I see a face, and I shut my eyes and picture it to myself." This is not an act of representation, but of memory. There is a re-presenting, but no representation, in memory; for, so far as the fact is not reproduced in memory, there is no memory, but simply fancy or imagination. The objects of reflection are simply the objects originally presented with only this difference, that, in presentation, the fact of consciousness is myself as subject knowing, whereas in reflection it is myself as subject reflecting, and, in memory, myself as subject remembering.
Fancy and imagination are, in a loose way, called creative faculties; but properly creative they are not. Creation is production of substantial existences or things from nothing that is, without any materials, by the sole energy of the creator. Fancy and imagination can operate only on and with materials which have been or are presented to the mind. Fancy is mimetic and simply imitates imagination, as throughout the universe the lower imitates the higher, as the universe copies the Creator, or seeks to actualize the type in the Divine mind; and hence St. Thomas says, Deus similitudo est omnium rerum. God creates all things after the type or ideal in his own mind, and idea in mente divina nihil est aliud quam essentia Dei. Hence, man is said to be made after the image and likeness of God, ad imaginem et similitudinem, though he is not the image of God; for that is the Eternal Word, who, St. Paul tells us, is "the brightness of his glory and the express image of his substance," or being. (Heb. i. 3.) Fancy is mimetic, and plays with sensations and sensibles; but though it combines them in its own way, as a winged horse, the objects combined are always objects of experience. Imagination is of a higher order than fancy, and operates on and with objects of experience, sensibles, intelligibles, and the ideal principles intuitively given. It sweeps through the whole range of creation, descends to hell, and rises to heaven; but its objects are always those which have been presented to the mind, which it can only arrange and combine in new forms of its own. {774} But the representations it produces are its products, not its object. In producing them, the mind has a real object as its correlate, as in presentation. Let the professor, then, abandon the absurdity which runs through his book that a mental creation or representation is the object of the soul in producing it. The object of the soul is the object whose activity joined to its own produces it.
Take the artist. The object in his richest and sublimest productions is the beautiful which he sees, which is his soul's vision and his soul's love, and which he seeks to express on canvas, in a statue, a temple, an oration, a poem, or a melody. Tell us not, as so many aesthetic writers do, that the artist projects from his own soul, or creates the beauty which he struggles to express in his work, and which he can never express to his satisfaction. The ideal infinitely transcends the expression. The soul contemplates the beautiful, but does not create it. The beautiful, as Plato somewhere says, "is the splendor of the Good." It is the splendor of the True and the Good, that is, of God; though Gioberti, in his Del Bello, seems to divorce it from the ideal, and, while asserting the reality of the object, would appear to resolve the beautiful into the subjective impression on the sensibility, produced by the apprehension of the object, which supposes that beauty exists only for sensible existences. It is as real as God himself, and as objective as the ideal formula. It is the divine splendor, inseparable from the Divine Being. Everything God has made participates, in a higher or lower degree, of beauty, because it participates of being; but beauty itself in its infinity is only in God himself, which exceeds all the power of men and angels to represent. The artist, by the noetic power of the soul, which, if a true artist, he possesses in a higher degree than ordinary men, beholds, contemplates, and loves it. It is; as we have just said, the vision of his soul and the object of his love. He detects it in creatures, in the region of fancy, in the mind, and in the soul itself, and adores it in the ideal. The power of detecting it in sensibles is fancy; in the ideal, is imagination. In seeking to represent it or express it in his productions, it is the real, the objective, he seeks to express or embody. He may form in his mind a representation of it, but that representation is not the object of the mind in either fancy or imagination, nor is it a pure mental representation, not only because it is formed after the real, but because it is formed only in conjunction with the activity of the real. [Footnote 282]
[Footnote 282: The artist ought always to be highly moral and devout, but whether so or not depends on the motive with which he acts, or purpose for which he seeks to embody the beauty he sees. The relation of aesthetics to ethics, of art to religion is easily understood. Art is not, as some Germans would persuade us, religion, nor is the culture of art true religious worship. Art may be licentious, and is, when it embodies only the sensual passions and affections of our nature, and the more so in proportion to the exquisite touch and skill in the execution. In no case can the brilliancy and perfection of the execution atone for the moral deformity of the object represented. Art which appeals simply to the senses, and inspires only sensible devotion, is not necessarily immoral, but is not positively moral or religious. But art which seeks to embody or express the ideal, the splendor of the real, the true, the good, whether as presented in the ideal intuition, or as participated by the creatures of God, can hardly fail to be moral and religious in its effect as well as in its ideal. God is worshipped in spirit and in truth, even worshipped in his works, for he enters into all his works as their cause, and their being is in him. We praise God in his saints, in all his works of nature or grace. The art is not the worship, but it is an adjunct to worship, and hence religion in all ages has called into its service the highest and richest forms of art.]
{775}
These remarks are sufficient to show that all that Dr. Porter says of the faculty of Representation is, when not confused or false, of no moment. He darkens instead of elucidating his subject. We pass on, therefore, to his Part III., on Thinking and Thought-Knowledge.
The mental operations treated by the author under the head of Thinking and Thought-knowledge, are those which Locke calls by the general name of reflection, and are conception, abstraction, or generalization, judgment, reasoning, deductive and inductive, and scientific or systematic arrangement. They are not faculties, but operations of the mind. The proper English name for the faculty on which they depend, so far as usage goes, is not thought, nor the power of thought--for every intellectual act, whether representative or presentative, is a thought--but understanding or reason. The old word was understanding, but it is objectionable, because it includes, according to present usage, only the intellectual activity of the soul, and implies nothing of voluntary activity. Reason is the better term; for it combines both the intellectual and the volitive activity of the soul.
The objection of the professor that "reason is used for the very highest of the rational functions, or else in a very indefinite sense for all that distinguishes man from the brute," does not appear to us to be conclusive. Every intellectual act, the highest as the lowest, is thought, an act of one and the same thinking faculty. The objects and conditions of knowledge may vary, but the faculty of knowledge does not vary with them. Reason is not used in a more indefinite sense when used for all that distinguishes man from the brute, than is thought as used by the professor. Man is well defined to be animal rationale, or rational animal; but this does not mean that man is animal plus reason, but the animal transformed by reason; and hence there is a specific difference between the sort of intelligence which it seems difficult to deny to animals, and the intelligence of man. All human intelligence is rational, the product of reason. Coleridge and our American transcendentalists, after Kant, attempted to distinguish between understanding [Verstand] and reason [Vernunft], and to restrict understanding to that portion of our knowledge which is derived through the senses, and reason to an order of knowledge that transcends all understanding, and to which only the gifted few ever attain. But they have not been successful. Knowledge of the highest objects, as of the lowest, is by the same faculty, and we may still use reason in its old sense, as the subjective principle of all the operations the professor calls thinking.
The word reason is, indeed, used in an objective as well as in a subjective sense. As subjective, it is a faculty of the soul; the objective reason is the ideal formula, and creates and constitutes the subjective reason. Cousin distinguishes between the two, but as between the personal and the impersonal--a mere modal distinction, not a distinction of substance. He identifies the objective reason with the [Greek text] or Word of God, while it is really identical with the ideal formula, which embraces both being and existences, united and distinguished by the creative act of being, as explained in our former article. This asserts a distinction of subject and of substance between the objective and subjective reason asserted by Cousin. In the objective reason, God, in the subjective, man, is the actor; and there is all the difference of substance between them that there is between God and man, or between real, universal, and necessary being, and finite, contingent existence. {776} They ought not to be both called by the same name, and we ourselves rarely so call them. We ourselves call the objective reason the ideal formula, or, briefly, the ideal; yet good writers and speakers do use the word in both senses. They say, "Man is endowed with reason," or has a "rational nature," in which they employ the term subjectively. They say, also, of such an assertion, "It is unreasonable, or it is contrary to reason;" that is, to the truth, or principle of things, in which they use it objectively, as they do when they speak of the principles affirmed in the ideal formula, and call them the reason, necessary and absolute ideas, or the principles of reason; for nothing necessary or absolute is or can be subjective.
We ourselves use the word in a subjective sense, and understand by it the faculty of reasoning, or the subjective principle of all our mental operations. It is not a simple power, but a complex power, embracing both the percipient and volitive capacities of the soul. In every rational operation of the soul, there is both perception and volition, and it is this fact that distinguishes reason from the simple power of perception, or intellectual apprehension. We see and we look, and we look that we may see; we hear and we listen, and listen that we may hear. The looking and the listening are peculiarly rational acts, in which the soul voluntarily, or by an act of the will, directs her intellectual capacities to a special intellectual purpose or end. This voluntary activity, or direction of the capacity to know, must not be confounded with free will; it is the voluntarium of the theologians, distinguished, on the one hand, from spontaneity, and on the other, from the liber arbitrium, or free will, which is the faculty of electing or choosing between right and wrong, and implies, whichever it chooses, the power to choose the contrary. It is the principle of all moral accountability. The voluntarium is a simple, voluntary activity, or power of directing our attention to this or that intellectual object, or of using the cognitive power in the service of science. The reason may be defined, then, the soul's faculty of using her intellectual and volitive powers for the explication and verification of the knowledge furnished by presentation.
With these preliminary remarks we proceed to consider some of the mental operations which give us what Professor Porter calls Thought-Knowledge. We do not question the fact of these operations, nor their importance in the development of our rational life; what we deny is, that they are a power or faculty of the mind, and that in performing them they are objects of the mind, or that they add anything to the matter of our knowledge.
The professor says, p. 383, "The power of thought [reason] as a capacity [faculty] for certain psychological processes, is dependent for its exercise and development on the lower powers of the intellect. These furnish the materials for it to work with and upon. We must apprehend the individual objects by means of the senses and consciousness [pure sensism] before we can think these objects." So in consciousness and sense-perception we do not think, and we must apprehend sensibles before we can think them! To intellectually apprehend an object is to think it. Intellectual apprehension and thought are one and the same fact. The professor continues, "We can classify, explain, and methodize only individual things, and these must first be known by sense and consciousness before they can be united and combined into generals." {777} Here are two errors and one truth. The first error is in regarding consciousness as a cognitive power or faculty, and the second is in confining the individual things to sensibles, or the material world. We know in presentative knowledge not only the sensible but the supersensible, the intelligible, or ideal. The ideal principles cannot be found, obtained, or created by the mind's own activity, and are apprehended by the mind only as they are given intuitively by the act of the Creator; but being given, they are as really apprehended and known by the mind as any sensible object; nay, are what the mind apprehends that is most clear and luminous, so luminous that it is only by their light that even sensibles are mentally apprehensible or perceptible. The one truth is that the objects of the soul in her operations must first be known either by perception or intuition before they can be classified, explained, and methodized. Hence the operations of which the author treats under this head do not extend our knowledge of objects. They are all reflective operations, and reflection can only re-present what has already been presented.
The professor is right in maintaining that only individual objects are apprehensible, if he means that we apprehend things only in individuo or in concreto; for this is what we have all along been insisting on against him. Things are not apprehensible in general, but in the concrete. Hence Rosmini's mistake in making the first and abiding object of the intellect ens in genere, which is a mere possible ens, and no real being at all. It is simply conception or abstraction formed by the mind operating on the intuition of real being, which never is nor can be abstracted or generalized. Yet the author has argued under both presentative knowledge and representative knowledge that the mind, sometimes with, and sometimes without, anything distinct from and independent of itself, creates its own object; and that the object, as well as the act, may be purely psychical. Thus he tells us that in sense-perception we do not perceive the material thing itself, but the joint product of the material agent and the sentient organism; and that in representation the object represented may be unreal, chimerical, and exist only in the soul, and for the soul alone. And he dwells with great unction on the relief and advantage one finds in escaping from the real world to the unreal which the soul creates for herself. True, he says that whatever the object, real or unreal, abstract or concrete, it is apprehensible only as an individual object; but the unreal, the chimerical, the abstract, is never individual. Why does he call conceptions concepts, if not because he holds the conception is both the act and the object of the mind in conceiving? And does he hold the concept to be always individual, never general? Conception, in his system, is always a generalization, or a general notion, formed by the mind, and existing only in the mind. How, then, can it be an object of the mind? He says truly the object is individual, but "the concept (p. 391) is uniformly general." And yet, in the very first paragraph on the next page, he calls it an object of cognition! Farther on, he says, "The concept is a purely relative object of knowledge," whatever that may mean; and in the same section, section 389, he speaks of it "as a mental product and mental object.'" To our understanding, he thus contradicts himself.
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Yet we hold that whatever the mind cognizes at all, it cognizes in the concrete, as an individual object. And therefore we deny that the ideas of the necessary, the universal, of necessary cause, and the like, which the author calls intuitions, and treats as first principles, necessary assumptions, abstract ideas, etc., are abstractions, mental conceptions, or generalizations; for there are no concretes or individual objects from which they can be abstracted or generalized. As we really apprehend them, when affirmed in the ideal formula by the divine act, and as we cannot apprehend what is neither being nor existence, as the author himself says, though continually asserting the contrary; and as every existence is a finite contingent existence, they must be real, necessary, and universal being. They cannot be generalizations of being; for nothing is conceivable more general and universal than being. Being, taken in its proper sense, as the ens simpliciter of the schoolmen, is itself that which is most individual and, at the same time, the most general, the most particular and the most universal. These so-called necessary ideas, then, are being; and in apprehending them as intuitively affirmed, we do really apprehend being. Hence, as being, real and necessary being, is God, whom the theologians call Ens necessarium et reale, God, in affirming the ideal formula, intuitively affirms himself, and we really apprehend him, not as he is in himself, in his essence, indeed, but as being, the ideal or the intelligible, that is, as facing our intelligence; or, in other words, we apprehend him as the subject of the judgment, Ens creat existentias, or as the subject of the predicate existences, united and distinguished by his creative act, the only real, as the only possible, copula.
The author makes man the analogon of God, and, indeed, God in miniature, or a finite God, and gravely tells us, p. 100, that "we have only to conceive the limitations of our being removed, and we have the conception of God." But as we are not being, but existence, we are finite and limited in our very nature; remove the limitations, and we are not God, but nothing. Eliminate the finite, says Père Gratry, and you have God, in the same way and by the same process that the mathematician has his infinitesimals. But this process of elimination of the finite gives the mathematician only the infinitely less than the finite number or quantity, and it would give the theologian not the infinitely greater but the infinitely less than the finite existence. Besides, the process could at best give us not God in his being, but a mere abstract God, existing only as a mental generalization. The universal cannot be concluded from the particular, nor the necessary from the contingent, because, without the intuition of the universal and the necessary, we have and can have no experience of the particular and the contingent--a fact we commend to the consideration of the inductive theologians.
As the conception is always general, it can never be the object of the mind in the fact of thought. It is a product of the mind operating on the individual object or objects with which the mind has thought, and is never the object itself. The same may be said of generalization, abstraction, and every form of reasoning. But if this be so, in what are conceptions, abstractions, etc., known? If they are known at all, they must be objects of knowledge; if not known at all, how can we think or speak of them? {779} They are known in knowing their concretes, as the author himself tells us. As concepts, abstractions, generalizations, or general notions, they do not exist in nature, and cannot be known or thought. But they exist as qualities or properties of things, and are known in knowing the things themselves. Thus we know round things; all round things have the same property of being round; we may, then, consider only this property common to all round things, and form the general conception of roundness; but we do not see or apprehend roundness, and the object of thought is always the round thing. So of all so-called universals that are abstractions, conceptions, or generalizations. The object known is the concrete; the abstraction, abstracted from it, being nothing, is not known or even thought.
But Cousin, in his Philosophie Scholastique, has very properly distinguished general conceptions or general notions from genera and species. The former are real only in their concretes, and knowable only in them; the latter are real, and actually exist a parte rei. Genus has relation to generation, and is as real as the individual, for it generates the individual. Hence, we cannot agree with Leibnitz, when he makes the genus or species consist in resemblance, and declares that resemblance real. The individual does not merely mimic the genus, but is produced by it. The genus is always causative in relation to the species, and the species, in relation to the individual. The intelligible is always causative in relation to the sensible, which copies or imitates it. The genus is not the possibility of individuals, nor are they its realization. It is not a property or a quality of men as individuals, for it is, in the order of second causes, the cause producing them, and therefore cannot be generalized from them, or be a general notion or conception, like roundness, the generalization or abstract of round. Without the genus there could be no generation, as without a generator there could be no genus. Yet, though genera and species, the only universals, properly so-called, are, as the old realists held, real, existing a parte rei, and are distinguishable from the individuals, as the generator from the generated, the species from the specificated; they are not separable, and do not exist apart from them. Adam was an individual, lived, acted, sinned, repented, and died, as an individual man; yet was he the generic, as well as individual, man; for he was the whole human race, and the progenitor of all men that have been born or are to be born.
But while we adopt, in relation to genera and species, the doctrine of the mediaeval realists, we hold with regard to other so called universals with St. Thomas, who says they exist in mente cum fundamento in re. The fundamentum in re of conceptions, abstractions, and generalizations is precisely the individual objects apprehended by the mind from which reason abstracts or generalizes them. The only point which we now make against the author is that the object of thought or knowledge is not the conception or notion, but the object from which the reason forms it; and that in it nothing is thought beyond that object. Philosophy has been divested of its scientific character, made infinitely perplexing and most difficult to be understood, as well as utterly worthless, by being regarded as the science, not of things, but of these very conceptions, abstractions, and general notions, which, apart from their individuals or concretes, are pure nullities. {780} We insist on this, because we wish to see philosophy brought back to the real, to objects of experience in their relation to the ideal formula; and our principal quarrel with the professor is, that his philosophy is not real, is not the science of realities, but of conceptions and abstractions.
We can hardly pause on what the professor says of judgment and the proposition. We can only remark in passing that every thought, every perception, even, is a judgment--a judgment that the object thought or perceived is real or really exists. Every affirmation is a judgment, and every judgment is an affirmation; for denials are made only by affirming the truth denied. Pure negations are unintelligible, present no counteraction to the mind, and cannot be thought. "The fool hath said in his heart, God is--not." It is only by asserting that God is that we can deny that he is. Every negation is the contradiction of what it affirms. So-called negative judgments are really affirmative. We do not mean that denials cannot be made, for we are constantly making them; but they can be made only by affirming the truth; and the denial that transcends the truth affirmed in the denial is simply verbal, and no real denial at all. Universal negation is simply impossible; and hence when we have shown that any system of philosophy leads logically to nihilism, or even universal scepticism, we have refuted it. Logicians tell us that of contradictories one must be false; but it is equally just to say, that of contradictories one must be true; for truth cannot contradict itself, and only truth can contradict falsehood.
But we pass on to Reasoning, which the professor holds to be mediate judgment, and to which we hold all the reflective operations of reason may be reduced. What a mediate judgment is, we do not know. Reasoning may be necessary as the means and condition of judging in a certain class of cases, but the judgment itself is in all cases direct. The error of the professor here, as throughout the whole of this Part III., and, indeed, of his whole treatise, is that he treats every question from the point of view of conception, or the general notion, instead of the point of view of reality, as he cannot help doing as an inductive psychologist.
Reasoning is a reflective operation. It operates on the matter presented by ideal intuition and experience; it clears up, explains, verifies, and classifies what is intuitively affirmed, together with what experience presents. Its instrument is language. We can think without language, and so far De Bonald was wrong, unless he understood, as the professor does, by thought, an act of reflection; but we cannot reflect or reason without language of some sort to re-present to the mind's contemplation the ideal or intelligible intuition. This re-presentation is not an act of the soul herself, nor the direct and immediate act of the Creator, as is the ideal intuition. It is effected only by language in which the ideal or intelligible is embodied and represented, and of which it is the sensible sign or representation. In other words, the ideal is an object of reflection only as taught through the medium of language; for we must bear in mind that man is not pure spirit or pure intelligence, but spirit united to body, and that he must have some sort of sensible representation in order to reflect. {781} Hence the peripatetic maxim, nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu, which does not mean that only sensibles are cognizable, but that nothing can be reflectively thought, or as the Italians say, re-thought, (ripensare,) without sensible representation. That God is, can be proved with certainty by reason; for we have immediate intuition of that which is God in the intuition of real and necessary being; but we cannot reach the conclusion that the intuitively affirmed object really is God without reflecting on the intuition, and this we cannot do unless it is re-presented or held up to our contemplation in language, or without its being sensibly represented by the word God. Language is the necessary instrument of reason; we cannot reason without it, and only rational existences have language properly so called. No animal deprived of "the discourse of reason" has even articulation.
Those philosophers, or pretended philosophers, who regard language either as a human invention or as the spontaneous production of human nature, have never duly considered its office in the development of thought, and in the rational operations of the soul. Men could not have invented language without reflection, and without language they cannot reflect. It needs language to be able to invent language. The other theory is no better. The soul does not secrete language as the liver secretes bile, for language has in it more than human nature. The spontaneous productions of nature may be less than nature, but cannot be more. There is a philosophy in language broader and deeper than human thought, a philosophy that embraces elements which are known only by revelation, and which human nature does not contain. All language is modelled after the ideal formula. Its essential elements are subject, predicate, and copula, or the noun, adjective, and verb. The verb and adjective may be, and often are, combined in the same word, but they can be resolved always into the predicate and copula. The copula is always the verb to be, or its equivalent in other languages than our own, and this verb is the only verb in any language.
The verb to be is precisely the name of God himself, the SUM QUI SUM. We cannot make, then, a single assertion but by the Divine Being, and he enters as the copula into every one of our judgments without which no affirmation can be expressed. But God is supernatural, and is the author of nature; the ideal formula which is repeated in every judgment is not contained in human nature, is not in the human mind as in its subject, but is above our nature, and by affirming itself creates our nature, both physical and intellectual. How then could our nature, operating simply as second cause, produce spontaneously language which in its essential nature expresses what is beyond and above itself? Men, especially philosophers, or rather theorizers, have corrupted and still continue to corrupt language, as we can see in the book before us; but we have never yet heard of any one by the spontaneous action of nature secreting or producing a language, or of any one having a language without being taught it. Yet nature is all to-day that it ever was, and as fresh, as vigorous, as prolific. Even the fall has not deprived it of any of its primitive faculties, capacities, properties, or tendencies. If language is a spontaneous production of human nature, we ought to have some instances of children growing up and speaking a rich and philosophical language without having ever learned it. {782} For ourselves, we have a huge distrust of all those theories which assume that nature could and did do in the past what she does not and cannot do in the present. Our savants employ themselves in seeking the types of domestic animals in the wild races; why not seek the type of the wild races in the domestic? Why suppose man could and once did domesticate races which he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to domesticate now? We do not believe much in the modern doctrine of progress, but we believe just as little in the wonderful superiority of nature and men in ante-historical times, which is sometimes assumed, especially by the champions of progress.
Language is neither a human invention nor a natural production, but was created by God himself and infused into man along with the affirmation of the ideal formula, when he made him and placed him in the Garden, and it has been perpetuated by tradition, or by being handed down from father or rather mother to child. It comes to us from the hand of the Creator; he who made man gave him speech. We can explain the origin of language in no other way, as we can explain the origin of man only by saying with the catechism, God made him. As language is the instrument of reason, and re-presents to his contemplation the ideal which the Creator fitted it to symbolize, its corruption or confusion has a most disastrous effect on philosophy. It was confounded at Babel, and men lost the unity of speech, and with it the unity of the ideal, and were dispersed. The Gentiles lost the unity of language, and they lost with it the unity of the ideal, or the copula of the divine judgment, and labored to explain, as our modern savants are laboring to explain, the existence and laws of the universe without the creative act of God. Language, corrupted re-presented to the ancient Gentiles, and as it does to our modern physiologists and psychologists, the ideal only in a mutilated form, and hence the fatal error of Gentilism and of modern so-called science, which asserts pantheism. It is necessary, in order to have a true philosophy, to have some means of preserving the purity and infallibility of speech, and at no former period was such means more necessary than it is now.
The instrument of reasoning is language; its form is the syllogism, which is given in the ideal formula. All the matter of knowledge is given in presentation, and the syllogism does not advance it; but it explains, distinguishes, arranges it according to the real relations of the objects known, clears up what is obscure, and verifies what is uncertain, doubtful, by reducing the whole to its principle or principles. The principle and model of the syllogism are in the ideal. Being and existences are the extremes, and the creative act is the medius terminus. The major represents being, the minor existences, and the middle term produces the conclusion. To this regular form of the syllogism every form of argument is reducible. If the major is universal, and the minor is proved, the conclusion is necessary and apodictic.
The modes in which reason operates are two, deduction and induction, or analysis and synthesis. Induction is simple analysis, or what Kant calls analytic judgment, and simply dissects the subject, analyzes it, and brings out to our distinct view what is in it. It is never illative, but always explicative, and enables us to distinguish the part in the whole, the property in the essence, or the effect in the cause. {783} Dr. Porter entirely mistakes it in supposing it to be an imperfect induction. There is nothing inductive in it. Induction is what Kant calls a synthetic judgment a posteriori, and adds an element not contained in the subject analyzed. In synthetic judgments a posteriori, the added element is taken from experience; in synthetic judgments a priori, the added element is from the ideal formula, intuitively given, or rather, the ideal formula is that into which what Kant calls synthetic judgments a priori are resolvable. The syllogism is used in deduction and in induction; yet it is not properly either, but is productive. As being creates existences, so the major through the middle term unites the minor to itself and produces the conclusion. Such men as Sir William Hamilton and J. Stuart Mill, who reject the middle term, and hold the major may be a particular proposition, are misled by their philosophy, which excludes the creative act of God both from the universe and from science. No man who has a false or defective philosophy can understand logic as a science. Pantheism, which excludes the creative act, is the supreme sophism. It is not easy to say what Dr. Porter's views of logic, either as a science or as an art, really are.
The chief complaint against the professor here is, that he makes reasoning turn on the laws of the mind, on conceptions, and general notions, and reflecting, as logic, only the relations and forms of the creations or products of the mind, instead of the relations and forms of things. He studies everything from the point of view of the mental act, instead of studying them from the point of view of the ideal intuition, which is the point of view of God himself. He therefore gives in his science, not things as they are, but as the mind conceives them.
The conceptions and general notions play, no doubt, an important part in the process of reasoning, but they play not the chief part, nor do they impose upon logic the laws it must follow. The categories are not general conceptions or general notions, formed by generalizing individuals or particulars. M. Cousin assumes that he has reduced them to two, substance and cause, or being and phenomenon: but as with him substance is a necessary cause, and as phenomenon is only an appearance or mode of substance, his reduction is really to one, the category of substance, which it is needless to say is pure pantheism. They, however, may be reduced to the three terms of the ideal formula; for whatever is conceivable is being, existence, or the creative act of being. The categories are not, then, merely formal, simply conceived by the mind cum fundamento in re; but are the ideal principles of things themselves. Take the categories of space and time, which seem to puzzle the author as they have puzzled many greater and wiser men than he. Space is ideal and actual. Ideal space is the power or ability of God to externize his act, that is, to create or act ad extra; and actual space is the relation of coexistence of his externized acts or creatures. Ideal space pertains to being, is being itself; actual space being a real relation between creatures, and, like all relations, really existing in the related, comes under the head of existences, and is joined to being as well as distinguished from it by the creative act. The reason of space and time is the same. Time also is ideal and actual. Actual time is the relation of succession, and ideal time is the ability of God to create existences that, as second causes, are explicated and completed successively, or reach their end progressively. Ideal time is God. Actual time is creature, since all relations really exist in the related. The difficulty which so many eminent men have felt with regard to these two categories, evidently reducible to the terms of the ideal formula, grow out of their attempt to abstract them, the ideal from God, and the actual from the related, whether existences or events. Take away the body and the space remains, says Cousin. Certainly; because the intuition of the ability of God to externize his act--that is to create--remains. So of time. So of the infinite lines of the geometrician. No actual line is infinite, and the conception of its infinity is based on the intuition of the infinite power or ability of God, the real ground on which the line, when conceived to extend beyond the actual, is projected.
There are various other points presented by the learned professor in this part and in Part IV. on which we intended to comment, but we have exhausted our space and the patience of our readers. We have said enough, however, to show that he recognizes intuition only as an act of the soul, and therefore, however honorable his intention, since he fails to recognize ideal intuition, which is the act of God, he fails to get beyond experience, to extend science beyond the sensible or material world with the operations of the soul on sensations, and therefore cannot be followed as a safe guide in the philosophy of the human mind. He has learning, industry, and even philosophical instincts, but is ruined by his so-called Baconian method.
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Heremore-Brandon; Or, The Fortunes Of A Newsboy.
Chapter VI
I could not tell you one half the projects Dick formed and rejected as entirely hopeless before he at last succeeded in inducing a gentleman who had been very kind to him to make an offer to Mr. Brandon of some place in his office, which, while it would not be more than, with his now broken energies and failing health, he could easily perform, if he had the disposition, would give him something to help him live upon.
Soon after this offer was made and (with much grumbling) finally accepted, Dick, without really seeking it, found himself becoming known to Mr. Brandon; and, thanks to the patience with which he listened to that gentleman's railings against the world, and his own hard fortunes in it, taken into favor. It was a very sad sight for a hopeful, self-respecting, God-fearing Catholic like Dick to see this querulous man, from whom all vigorous spirit seemed to have fled, brooding over his losses, instead of holding up his head, and bravely going forth to make the most of what was left; a sad thing to hear these miserable repinings in which there was never a thought of gratitude for the long years of comfort and plenty with which God had blessed him. {785} But Dick bore it patiently, and sought in every way which his simple experience could devise to draw him from his despondency; to inspire him with some trust in God. It was, however, without any apparent success, other than greater condescension from Mr. Brandon, who, at last, weak and nervous, would gladly avail himself of Dick's young strength in his walks home.
And so, in time, that which had seemed the impossible came to pass very naturally. Mr. Brandon urged Dick to enter the house, and he was received as a guest in Miss Brandon's home. Home it must be called, I suppose; though it was a dreary, desolate room, with "boarding-house" stamped in glaring letters all over the grey walls and badly-assorted furniture. Even Dick could realize that it must be a very different home from any which Miss Brandon had ever seen before; for it was far different from the only pretty rooms he had ever entered--those dear, clean, sweet rooms at Mrs. Alaine's.
"Mr. Heremore, Mary," was his introduction, accompanied by a patronizing wave of Mr. Brandon's hand. Do not be surprised; you know I have never said--not even in his days of prosperity--that he was a gentleman--"Mr. Heremore, Mary; a young man who has thought it not worth while to be unkind and disrespectful to an old man who has lost every thing."
"I have heard my father speak of you often," said Mary very quietly; but in such gentle tones that Dick wondered how any man could count himself poor--knowing her.
"I really felt very nervous," Mr. Brandon further explained, "about coming home alone. I have been so very uncomfortable to-day. But that's of no consequence, of course, now."
"I am very glad you brought Mr. Heremore," Mary answered readily, and with more warmth than before; and I am sure he was very careful of you."
After that, conversation became somewhat easier; although Dick felt half like an impostor, and could not do much to second Miss Brandon's efforts to make the hour go by pleasantly. She had several albums and scrap-books of engravings with which she tried to entertain him; but to do his best, he could think of little else than the languid, weary manner which had replaced the quick steps and stately sweetness he had known of old. When Mr. Brandon left them for a few minutes, she turned with animation and said:
"Mr. Heremore, I must thank you for your kindness to my father. I would not have him suppose I consider it kindness, but in my heart I know it is, and I know you mean it as such. Since things have gone wrong with him, he seems to have changed his whole nature; he does not appear to have any courage to stand against the tide. I suppose it would have been very different if Mrs. Brandon had lived; a wife would have kept his spirits up as no one else can."
"I know," stammered Dick, not knowing what to say under the gaze of her beautiful eyes, "I know--that the death of your mother last summer--"
"Mrs. Brandon, you mean," she interrupted in her quietest tones, "that is, my father's second wife. This Mrs. Brandon was not my mother; my own mother died long ago." This so coldly that, for some inexplicable reason, Dick fancied she was glad to correct him.
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"You were in the carriage at the same time," said Dick, feeling that he must say something.
"Yes," answered Mary, "but I remember little about it; as soon as we found the horses were running away, Mrs. Brandon became very much alarmed, and almost before I could say a word to her, we were thrown out, and were both picked up senseless. She was not conscious of anything again. All these things together have completely unnerved poor papa, and I really feel very grateful to any one who is interested in him. His old friends have received but little encouragement to visit us here, although it is only a fancy of papa's, I am sure, that they feel any difference, and he is often quite lonely."
Mr. Brandon soon returned, and seeming to wish his daughter's undivided attention, Dick rose and said, "good-night."
It need hardly be said that he was after this more enthusiastically devoted to their fortunes than ever before. He spent a few hours there at different times during the winter and spring, and soon found himself at ease in that dreary room; but as he knew Mary better, his reverence for her, while it diminished not in the least, became a deep and fervent feeling, which kept her always in his thoughts. She, too, seemed to regard him with very kindly feelings, and the sympathy between them was so strong that it bore down many of their differences of association and education, and each was astonished to find an unexpectedly ready understanding in the other. But as yet Dick had said nothing of the little girl on the steps who gave him her candy one cold Christmas morning years ago.
Once at New-Year's, and again on the 22d of February, holidays on which he was free, Dick had been down to the cottage in the country, and had seen Rose and the boys skate and make snow-houses, and spent two of the coziest, happiest evenings of his life around the bright fire, talking pleasant talk with those dear people, among whom alone he realized the faintest idea of the word home. Now time had gone by so rapidly that he was to spend a whole week there as he had the year before. But not exactly the same; for the last time he had been there a clear, bright day in February, when they were all coming home from the skating-pond together--it had chanced that he and Rose had fallen far in the rear of the children, who, having skated since one o'clock in the keen air, professed themselves "ever so hungry," and, as Dick would not hurry with them, walked off in disgust, each declaring to the other that they didn't like Mr. Dick, half so much this time as before; he was "no good" at all.
"What a magnificent day!" Dick said, for about the tenth time, as he tramped by Rose's side through the crisp snow, just as the sun was going down in one great glow before them. "I think I never saw a more splendid winter day in all my life."
Not thinking of any addition to this speech, and not being able with truth to contradict it, Rose kept on her way, her neat little boots cutting the snow, and making, Dick thought, the most delicious music there ever was. Rose looked especially charming that afternoon; from the very crown of her head, with her wealth of golden hair, only half hidden by her felt hat, to the dainty little boots before mentioned, which her warm skating dress, looped up, did not even affect to conceal, Rose was charming. {787} Dick thought that her very cloak seemed to nestle more lovingly to her plump figure than another's would; and as for the tiny muff, Uncle Carl's present, and the blue silk handkerchief knotted around her neck, Dick was certain that Stewart never sold anything half so pretty. So, if his lips talked about the weather, it is hardly surprising that his eyes embraced another subject; and I question if, when her demure glances met his gaze, Rose needed words to tell her its meaning; for, after all, are words, the dearest and sweetest that come from the lips, any dearer or sweeter than those the eyes speak?
But whatever she knew, Rose was a true little woman, and showed no sign.
"This is the place where Mrs. Brandon was thrown," she said, as they passed a broad street cutting across the narrow road they were following. "Just by those trees. They say the horses could have been managed only for her screams; a woman who screams at such a time must have very little sense."
"I think so," answered Dick, looking sadly toward the place Rose pointed out.
"Miss Mary behaved wonderfully well," continued Rose, with one quick look into Dick's face as they passed on. "She was perfectly calm, and tried to quiet Mrs. Brandon. She was very much hurt herself."
"Yes, so I have heard; she shows it, too; you would hardly recognize her now, she is so thin and altered."
"But, of course, she is more beautiful for that," said little, plump Rose, who had a great idea of delicate, fragile girls.
"Not more beautiful, exactly," answered Dick, who had not a great idea of delicate, fragile girls, "but it makes one feel for her more."
"I know you feel for her very much," said Rose.
"I have always honored her very much," answered Dick warmly. "It almost seems presumption for me to say I feel for her; but I do, indeed I do."
"I am sure of it," Rose responded with great warmth, and then there was silence for a long time.
Rose broke it with a little trembling in the first word or two at her own audacity, but gathering courage as she went on: "I knew you did when you were here last summer; then I heard of her father's failure, and then it seemed more natural; and--now--I am very glad for your sake. I hope you will be very happy. I do, indeed."
Now, Dick was no fool, and when the strangeness of this speech caused him to look harder than ever into the glowing but demure little face by the side of him, he felt for the moment a great inclination not to say a word; for provokingly innocent as she looked, he did not believe she was at all so ignorant of the real state of things. Rose felt the moment's hesitation, and, poor little thing, got frightened at her own conjuring, which fright so changed the expression of her face that Dick's hesitation vanished, and he answered:
"Of course I know what you mean, Rose, although it is so strange. I do not think of such a thing--it would be very strange if I did. You know better, don't you, Rose?"
Rose looked up with a careless answer, but thought better of it, and said nothing.
"You never did really think it, did you, Rose?" he added, pursuing his advantage, and repeating it until there was no escape for Rose, who had to answer truthfully, "No." She having made this concession, he made one, and told her the story of his boyish days, and of the Christmas day when he first saw Mary Brandon. {788} He had not felt very easy about Rose's opinion of much he had to tell her, and was greatly relieved when he saw all her assumed carelessness depart, and that she listened to him with earnest sympathy. He was so encouraged by the gentle, womanly interest she gave him that he did not stop with the history of his boyish days, but went on to narrate a later experience; very few words sufficed for this. When he told it, Rose understood very well why, if Mary Brandon were a queen upon her throne, she would be no more than friend or sister to him.
After that, there seemed no more to be said; for they finished the walk in the still winter twilight almost in silence.
That was in February, when Dick went down to Carlton to spend Washington's birthday, and it inaugurated a new era for Will. Rose had a sudden interest in the post-office, which was a long walk from the cottage, and, in rainy weather or on very busy days, was beyond her reach. I believe all her spare pennies went into Will's coffers about that time, and I am sure all her cakes and apples went into his possession; but, for all that, he was an ungrateful page, and wished "there wasn't no post-offices in the world," which opinion Will may alter when his own time comes.
This was in February, and it was now August, and Dick was going down for a week, one whole week in the country. Rose was at the gate as she had been a year ago; but she did not say "you are welcome," as she had said before. The children took him into favor when they found he had not come empty-handed, but had brought the books for Will, the doll for Trot, and just such toys for the rest as were most desired; and though many times in their rambles Will did have his patience sorely tried by "Mr. Dick's everlasting lagging," he was, on the whole, admitted to be an acquisition. I believe, though, that Rose's bosom-friend, Clara Hays, who was always urged to be of every party, and sadly neglected when she got there, was the greatest sufferer; it is not every day you see lovers who are perfectly well-bred and considerate for everybody. My excuse for Rose and Dick is, that they only had a week, and a week is such a short time when one is very happy!
Dick's week was nearly at its end when his birthday, his twenty-first birthday came, and his good friends made a little rejoicing for him in their homely way. It was a very beautiful August day, and was celebrated like a holiday by all the family. Yet it was not exactly a cloudless day for Dick, though it was the first birthday of his that had ever received the slightest notice from any one, and ought to have made him radiantly happy. He had received a present made for him with her own hands, with no one could tell how many loving thoughts of him worked in it, from his own dear Rose. His little table was covered with the first keepsakes he had ever received from any one, and still he was not happy. Among the treasures on his little table there stood one--which reminds me that I should not have called the others the first--from the mother whose face he could not remember, and what might it not contain? Hitherto he had thought but little of the box of which Carl spoke so slightingly years ago; but now that the day of opening it had come, he grew really afraid of it. He remembered stories of vengeance bequeathed from the grave, of crimes to be expiated by the children of the perpetrators years afterward, of fearful confessions of sin and sorrow and wrong in countless forms; and Dick, in the first glow of his first joyous days, did not know how he could bear even a mist upon the rising sun of his happiness.
{789}
"Not until the last thing to-night," he said finally, laying down the box and turning away from the table. "I will be happy to the last minute," and he went down to ask Rose to walk with him in the beautiful twilight after tea. It was earlier than he had thought when he went down, and Rose was reading in the shadow of the porch, or seeming to read, for a book was in her hand, and not, as he supposed, engaged in getting tea.
"I did not suppose I should find you here," said Dick.
"Shall I go away?" she asked, looking up and smiling.
"Yes, do," he replied, sitting by her, "you know there's nothing would please me better." But for all he tried to be gay, Rose saw that the shadow she had observed over him all day was deeper than before.
"Dear friend," she said, softened and made earnest at once, "something troubles you to-day."
"Yes, dear Rose, I am troubled to-day in spite of all the kindness shown me. My little box troubles me; I am afraid to open it."
"Then the best thing is to do it at once, is it not? One only makes such things worse by thinking about them."
"I know it. No, I will not open it now; I will have every moment of happiness I can first."
"What happiness can it take from you? You will be yourself still, let there be in it what there will. Our happiness is our own."
"O Rose!"
"O Dick! if we are good, are we not happy? And nobody can make us bad against our will."
"But, Rose, this may tell me something that you--there is my fear, Rose, it may take you away from me."
"Oh! no, Dick, dear Dick, how can anything take me away from you? But even if it did, you know we always said, 'If it were for the best.' If it were not for the best, we would not wish it, would we, dear? Yes, we could help wishing it; when the good God saw it was not best, he would give us strength to bear it."
"I never could bear it," said Dick.
"Yes, you would; but I am not afraid. One should not be afraid of one's own parents. Come, there is a long time before tea. We will go up the hill where no one will interrupt us, and where we shall be within call if we are wanted. Won't you get the box, Dick, and we will open it up there? that is, if you want me with you."
"You make me brave, dear Rose. Perhaps, after all, it is nothing."
So he did as she advised; and, seated a little back of the house, the only spot in which there could be five minutes' reading possible, he broke the seal, undid the wrapping, now yellow with age, while Rose spoke a word or two of courage, then turned her head a little away from him, and you may be sure prayed hard and fast for strength and grace for both to hear whatever of good or of evil was in store for them. Inside the wrapper Dick found a tiny key with which he eagerly unlocked the little mahogany box which was, perhaps, to make great revelations to him.
Then Rose drew still further away, from him, and with a more earnest gaze watched the sun going down to the west; for they were young, and many things that you and I would count the merest trifles, were of great importance to them; neither thought of anything worse than of something which should separate them. {790} Poor little Rose trembled lest he should find a will therein--as she had read in story-books--that would make him too rich and great for her to think of him; and Dick, to whom her love for him had always seemed a wonder--so great was his reverence for her and his own feeling of unworthiness--trembled lest he should find some legacy of disgrace that would make it impossible for him ever to see Rose again. So in silence and with wordless but earnest prayers, they sat together in the softening August sunlight, with hearts beating heavily for fear it might be for the last time.