"When Rome reels with the shock of the wild invaders' alarm, Then Æneas,- for near him a youth seemed ever to pace, Answer again Anchises began with a gathering tear:— Translation of Sir Charles Bowen. MELCHIOR DE VOGÜÉ (1848-) BY GRACE KING HE Vicomte Eugène Melchior de Vogüé, born at Nice, February 25th, 1848, is the leader, to characterize him in the most summary way, in the reactionary movement which has been the historic event of French literature during the last quarter of the century. He was the precursor of the movement, the evangelist of it, before it found official expression in literature; when, in the day of national misfortune and national need, the eyes of serious Frenchmen were opened to the slough of sensuality, which, draining through their literature and art into their life and manners, had diseased their morality and enervated their will. Various names, when the reaction first stirred thought, were essayed to define or describe the movement, such as Neo-Christian, and Spiritualization of Thought; it has been called Fiesolist, and likened to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England: but as time progresses, any sectarian class or period appellation seems to be too narrow for what is essentially a national evolution, a patriotic as well as a literary renaissance. More than any other man in French literature, M. de Vogüé has been the medium to express the broad nationality and Catholicity of the new birth; and it would be hardly too much praise to say that in the clear-sighted conservation of religion and politics, in his life and works, he typified it. On the first of January, 1890, in an open New-Year's letter "To Those who are Twenty Years Old," — that is, to those who were born during the Franco-Prussian war,- he gives the keynote of his life and works: "All who are capable of it owe to our country mental, more imperiously even than military, service." Twenty years before, he, a young soldier, in that crucial period just past his majority, was enduring the moral and physical suffering of defeat, the humiliation of prospective national and political annihilation. But he relates how the light shone before him on his road to Damascus : "It is now nearly twenty years ago that the truth made itself known in a flood to the one who writes these lines, as to many others,-to all those who were being carried along the road to Germany on the night of the first and second of September, 1870. The miserable procession was descending the slopes that lay between Bazeilles and Douzy. Below us the bivouac fires of the conquerors starred the valley of the Meuse. From the field of blood where were camped the hundred thousand men whom we thought sleeping. worn out with their victory, there arose upon the air one strong, one single voice from the hundred thousand breasts. They sang the hymn of Luther. The solemn prayer spread over the whole horizon, it filled the heavens, as far as there were fires- Germans. Far along in the night we heard it: it was so grand, so majestic, that not one of us could help thrilling with awe; even those, who, crushed by suffering and fatigue, were being driven out of what had been France,- even they forgot their grief for a moment in the unwelcome emotion. More than one of us, young as we were, and unripened by reflection, saw clearly in that moment what power it was that had vanquished us: it was not the girdle of steel cannon, nor the weight of regiments; it was the one superior soul, made up of all those different souls, steeped in one Divine national faith, firmly convinced that behind their cannon, God was marching with them at the side of their old King." "Methods of instruction and military training," he exclaims, "Krupp cannon and Mauser guns-nothing but accidents, all those things! Accidental also the sagacity of a Moltke, and of his lieutenants. What made these instruments terrible? The serious submissive soul of the people who used them!" From military service and imprisonment, Vogüé passed into what was intended as his career,-diplomacy; and was made attaché to the French embassy at Constantinople. Traveling through the EastPalestine, Syria, Egypt-among the aged monuments of human effort, the echoes of a vanished civilization, truth again came to him in a flood of new ideas: History appeared to him not as a corpse to be dissected, a tomb of the Past to be explored, but as humanity itself,— alive, present, vital; a drama to be seen with one's own eyes, felt in one's own veins; . . a thing of himself, of his brothers, of his country." "Picturesqueness of aspect, memories recalled of distant ages, visions, intuitions, dreams,- these are the things of greatest interest to me," he says frankly; in other words, the predominance of idea over fact, of the soul of the race over the soul of the individual. His letters written in the first glow of these illuminations from the East, and published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, made Vogue's name known in the literary world of the day. From Constantinople he was transferred to St. Petersburg, where he remained several years; years of fruitful literary activity, his labors-Russian stories, and studies of Russian life-enriching not merely the thought and literature of his own country, but of Europe and America. The door of Russian literature, opened by Mérimée, had swung to again. Vogüé has propped it open; and the great stream of what he calls "the new realism pleading the cause of humanity," that poured through its pages upon the arid mockery and materialism of French letters, was a divine irrigation upon desiccated seed. In the light of the harvest that arose therefrom in the literature of the world, it would seem impossible to do full justice to the importance of this one benefit conferred by Vogüé upon his fellow-men, without accepting his own belief that literature is a mission, not a profession. The Exhibition of 1889 has been generally adopted as a convenient date for the manifestation of the literary reaction in France, and Vogue's eloquent article upon it as its manifesto. For him the Exhibition was before all a problem of moral significance, an awakenment of energies in a people restored to their consciousness of self. "Let us hope," he concludes, "that science will one day reveal the Central Motor, the motor whence are derived the sometimes conflicting applications of power. We shall then learn that there is not found the transmission of the sovereign energy,—that there the principle itself stands condemned. The laws of the outward universe are but the reflex of the moral world within; and the universal force once adequately distributed in its proper channel will inspire the human heart for all the purposes of human life. In this new order of things, Force must regain its ancient name; with us, as with the Romans, it must be called Virtue. We may find at last, that in truth all metamorphoses of Force are but the transmutations of Virtue." The following extract from an article on the Neo-Christian movement in France, written by M. de Vogüé for Harper's Magazine, is the most authentic word upon it and his connection with it:— "Whatever may be the effective result of the Neo-Christian crises, they will require a long time to come to a head; and when the religious idea has conquered the cultivated classes, it will have to reconquer by a slow process of infiltration the people at large, whom M. Taine has shown as returning to paganism. Popular beliefs have persisted obstinately beneath the unbelief of higher spheres, and yielded only gradually to the preaching of incredulity. They will be born again with the same slowness, as a consequence of preaching in the opposite sense. We are in the presence of a nebula which is forming and wandering in the celestial space. The Creator always knows the hour and the place which he has marked for the condensation of this nebula into the solidity and brightness of an organized world. However imperfect and vague the nebula may be, men of good will prefer it to the gloom from which we are issuing. They are of opinion that the search after the ideal is a great sign of the raising up of France, where everything was on the point of sinking into gross realism,- both characters and minds, both public morality and intellectual productions. Those who have been the artisans of the present movement have the right to think that they have not lost their day's work; and since the writer of these pages has been often mocked for the part he has taken in the movement, may he be here allowed to claim openly his share in it.” XXVI-966 W DEATH OF WILLIAM I. OF GERMANY LIAM I. lies beneath the dome in the centre of the cold bare edifice in which the Lutherans of Prussia pray. In the empty temple there is only death and God-unless those four statues with fixed gaze, as rigid beneath their armor, as immovable as he over whom they watch, be men. Let us suppose the impossible-a stranger ignorant of the whole history of our times; he visits this monument, raises the military cloak, and asks who is this officer who sleeps here in the uniform of the First Regiment of the Grenadier Guards. Let us suppose -again the impossible that one of these fixities should open his mouth in reply, and simply repeat what his schoolmaster had taught him of the Emperor's life. The ignorant visitor would smile at these fantastic words: he would think the sergeant was reciting some marvelous fable of old Germany. For the real of to-day will become the marvelous of to-morrow; future ages will be found admiring but incredulous, as we now are for that which was the real in the olden times: for we do not know how to look at the dream moment in which fate makes us live; habit and the use of each day blind our moral sight. That which the soldier would have said to the stranger has been repeated to satiety for a week past. The history of William I. has been given in summary in all the papers, given in detail in books which are in everybody's hands. There is nothing for us to add; and if there were, should we have the power to do it? To dwell upon certain pages, the most necessary, the hand would tremble and the eye no longer see with clearness. A few words will suffice to recall the events of that long life, before we essay to judge it. Born in the decline of the other century,days already so far distant from us that they are already the days of our ancestors, a little cadet in a little State, this child of feeble health grew up on the steps of a crumbling throne. His eyes opened to see increasing upon the country and upon the world the oppressive shadow of Napoleon; they learned to weep over his country cut into pieces, over the agony of a mother a fugitive and mendicant in her own domains; his cradle is tossed about among the baggage of defeated armies: upon leaving this cradle he is dressed in the clothes of a soldier, to replace those whom the incessant war around him has mowed down; hussar, |