Arvède Barine

“ The eyes get larger, the features are less marked, and we have a hero of Romance, a dreamy, sentimental youth, the apocryphal Bernardin de Saint-Pierre which a vignette of the time of the Restoration shows us, seated at a cottage door, his eyes cast up to heaven, his handkerchief in his hand, while his dog fixes his eyes tenderly upon him, and a negress contemplates him with rapture. Legend has decidedly got the better of history. An insipid and rather ridiculous silhouette has insinuated itself in the place of a countenance full of originality and energy. ”

“ On all the planets, the souls of the just fly away after death into the sun, where they are better placed than anywhere else for enjoying a view of the whole universe. "It is there without doubt that you are, unfortunate Jean-Jacques, who, having reached the end of this life, behold a new one in the sun!" It is there that Bernardin hopes to go to find again his master, and from whence in spirit he sees himself throwing "a triumphant glance to earth where men weep, and where he is no longer." So ends the Harmonies de la Nature in a sort of ecstasy. ”

“ Everywhere wholesome Nature is in unequal conflict with diseased perfidious Art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea. Ruin and Death must strike down the loved one, and what is most significant of all, death even here not by necessity, but by etiquette. What a world of prurient corruption lies visible in that super-sublime of modesty! Yet on the whole our good Saint-Pierre is musical, poetical, though most morbid. We will call his book the swan-song of old dying France. ”

“ We may, many of us, be disposed to believe, with Lord Palmerston, that all babies are born good; but we feel tolerably certain that no babies, if left to themselves, would grow up like Paul and Virginia. What is more, we would not wish them to do so. To tell the truth, we cannot weep over Virginia. A young woman who chooses to drown in sight of land and her lover, with strong arms ready to save her, rather than disarrange her clothing, makes us contemptuously angry. Bashfulness is not modesty, nor can it be necessary to die under circumstances which might possibly render a blush becoming. ”

“ There is too much feeling, too much happiness; the world is too well-arranged and engineered, too highly coloured and varnished. [Pg 200] One agrees in the judgment which the book inspired in Joubert: "Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's style is like a prism which tires the eyes. After one has read him for long one is charmed to see that the grass and trees have less colour in nature than they have in his writings. His harmonies make us love the discords which he banishes from the world, and which one comes across at every step. Nature certainly has her music, but happily it is rare. ”

“ Bernardin de Saint-Pierre supposes himself to be upon "the most barren spot, a rock at the mouth of a river," and to be at liberty to ornament it with plants suitable to such a soil. These plants spring to life under his pen, and one sees them overrun this miserable corner of earth until its bareness disappears under a glorious mantle of vegetation in all sorts of brilliant and soft tints. ”

“ It is the poet, the Theocritus of the tropics, who begins. He sings of a voluptuous nature that squanders her caresses upon two nurslings. She lulls them to the murmur of the springs, and smiles upon them in a thousand brilliant colours. Around their cradle is only warmth and perfume. They develop harmoniously in this solitude, whose gentle influences are in accord with the gentleness of the sentiments placed by Providence in the hearts of the newly-born. ”

“ Ignorance invited the gods to share in its joys, its sorrows, its hymeneal festivities, and its funeral rites: science sees nothing there but the elements. It has abandoned man to man, and thrown him upon the earth as into a desert." Every epoch which repudiates the supernatural will recognize itself in this man abandoned to man, and feeling that he is in a desert.
It would have been best to stop there, glorifying ignorance on poetical grounds only. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre spoilt everything by insisting on the misdeeds of science. ”

“ A good man continues happy so long as he does not turn aside from "the law of nature." Take the savages again—their happiness is perfect, according to the missionaries, so long as they have no intercourse with civilised nations. Society "makes bad people" by its stupid and brutal laws, which ignore and defy those of nature and precipitate us into abysses of evil. Our education prepares our young people to be in their turn wicked, because it is founded upon the false idea with which our whole civilisation is impregnated: it develops the intelligence instead of developing the heart. ”

“ What shall be said of the "royal foresight" of the Divinity when it wishes to act upon our hearts and prepare them to learn patience, or open them to gentle feelings? Every one of us has mourned a dog, and has asked himself why these faithful animals have so short a life. Listen to the answer. "If the death of the dog of the house reduces our children, whose companion and contemporary he has been, to despair, doubtless Nature wished to give them, through the loss of an animal so worthy of human affection, their first experience of the privations of which human life is full." ”

“ Bernardin de Saint-Pierre foresaw that people might make some objections, and he hastened to be beforehand with them. "You Europeans, whose souls are filled from infancy with so many prejudices contrary to happiness, cannot understand that nature could give so much sagacity, judgment, and pleasure. Your souls, circumscribed by a small sphere of human knowledge, soon reach the limit of their artificial pleasures, but nature and the heart are inexhaustible." ”

“ The life of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is so unusual, so interesting, so suggestive and amusing, that the grumpiest of Anglo-Saxons need not complain of the fact that no series of Great French Writers would be complete which did not contain the name of the author of "Paul and Virginia." Even "Shakespeare's heirs" must accept the judgment of other nations about their own authors. Our duty is to comprehend a verdict we are powerless to upset. ”

“ It only needs, at the other side of the world, a Theocritus, or a Virgil, to give us pictures, at least as interesting as those of our country." The ambition to be the Theocritus and the Virgil of the tropics, comes out in all that he had hitherto written, but he wished for something more in his romance, and what follows makes one bless the insubordination of genius, which goes on its way laughing at the best made plans. "I also proposed to myself to bring forward in it several great truths; amongst others this one, that our happiness consists in living according to nature and virtue." ”

“ As soon as we have given up disputing with the author on fundamental grounds, we are filled with pleasure at his sincere enthusiasm, the wealth of his sensations and their quite modern subtilty. He is himself as though intoxicated by the vividness of his impressions. By the strength of his love for nature he confounds it with the Divinity, and adores the works instead of the Author of them. He speaks of nature with a tenderness which communicates itself to his writing and wins over his reader. He wished to re-open the door to Providence, he re-opened it to the great god Pan ”

“ The moon, quite red, rose in the misty horizon with extraordinary grandeur. The flocks, prostrate upon the hill-sides, inhaling the air, made the valleys echo with their sad bleatings. Even the Kafir tending them lay upon the earth to find some coolness there; but everywhere the ground was burning, and the stifling air resounded with the hum of insects, trying to quench their thirst in the blood of men and animals."
The drama now develops itself in strict accordance with these exterior sensations. "On one of those sultry nights Virginia felt all the symptoms of her malady redoubled. ”

“ If the world is arranged for the happiness of man, ought we not to explain the utility of moths and weevils after that of wool and corn? And if we see in it, as Saint-Pierre did, a means of compelling the monopolists to sell their merchandise for fear that the poor would have to go naked or die of hunger, have we not the right to maintain that one argument is worth another, and that it would be difficult for you to find a better? ”

“ It was six years after Buffon's Époques de la Nature had appeared, that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre offered to the public this astonishing system of the Universe. It needed a certain amount of courage to be so deliberately behindhand.
The theory of final causes thus carried to extremes occasioned a good deal of embarrassment to the Deist. It is no slight matter to undertake to explain, to the advantage of Providence, everything that there is upon the earth without any exception; so many things appear useless, so many hurtful. ”

“ The vegetation natural to the soil declares war against the foreign vegetation; the starry thistles, and the vigorous mullein choke the English turf with their large leaves; thick masses of coarse grass and clover crowd round the judas trees; dog rose-briers climb upon them with their thorny brambles, as though they were going to take them by assault; tufts of nettles take possession of the naiad's urn, and forests of reeds the Vulcan's forges; greenish patches of moss cover the faces of the Venuses, without respect for their beauty. Even the trees besiege the house ”

“ Saint-Pierre never despaired of finding justification for every one of them, with human happiness as its basis. He went on bravely without disturbing himself that the laugh was at his expense, and with an ardour of conviction which convinced many of the men and almost all the women who read him. ”

“ Jocelyn read and re-read Paul and Virginia. Graziella is lost from having heard it only once. Her soul, until then dormant, revealed itself to her in the soul of Virginia. Her beautiful impassive face becomes suddenly overspread with the stormy tints and [Pg 207] lines of passion. One hour has sufficed to transform an innocent and joyous child into a palpitating woman, ripe for love and its sufferings, and it is Bernardin de Saint-Pierre who has accomplished this miracle. ”

“ Admiration is another of the moral laws by which nature, left to herself, governs the earth. The author adds to it the pleasures of ignorance, which he declares to be incomparable. Ignorance is the supreme blessing from Heaven, the masterpiece of nature, "the never-failing source of our pleasures." We owe to it the exquisite enjoyments of mystery. It takes away all our ills, and embellishes the good things of this life with illusion, upholds the poetry of the world against science. ”

“ Sainte-Beuve is unfailing in praise of "Paul and Virginia." He discerns in it the notes of reality and freshness, the dew of youth is upon it,—it is sweet and comely. "What will ever distinguish this graceful pastoral is its truth, its humane and tender reality. The graces and sports of childhood are not followed by an ideal and mythical youth. ”

“ The history of nature presents only benefits, that of man nothing but wrath and rapine." And further on: "There are many lands which have never been cultivated; but there are none known to Europeans which have not been stained with human blood. Even the lonely wastes of the sea swallow up in their depths shiploads of men sent to the bottom by their fellows. In the towns, flourishing as they seem with their arts and monuments, pride and cunning, superstition and impiety, violence and treachery wage their eternal strife and fill with trouble the lot of the unfortunate inhabitants. ”

“ The occasion was unique for showing to France what she had lost through the incapacity of her ministers, who allowed the memorials of M. de Saint-Pierre to moulder in their portfolios. We thus return to Robinson Crusoe, the ideal colony, and those famous laws of nature which it is our mission to contrast with the laws made by man.
The laws of nature are "moral" and "sentimental" laws; they comprise in the first place all the good and noble sentiments which God has placed in our hearts. Just as reason is a miserable and inferior faculty, so sentiment is the glory and strength of mankind ”

“ On a day of inspiration Bernardin de Saint-Pierre conquered the glory, enviable above all others, and which is given to few; he created imaginary but living characters, beings who never existed, and who nevertheless remain more real and more alive than thousands of creatures of flesh and blood ”

“ Without paying regard to the common division of governments into democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, which are only at bottom political forms that determine nothing as to either their happiness or their power, we shall insist only on their moral constitution. Every government of whatever description is internally happy and respectable abroad when it bestows on all its subjects their natural right of acquiring fortune and honors, and the contrary takes place when it reserves to a particular class of citizens the benefits which ought to be common to all. ”