par From The Spectator. Born a poet, and evidently endowed with THE ROMANCE OF FRENCH CALVINISM.* One or two instances will suffice to show the general tone and scope of Madame de Gasparin's writings. The first story in the Near Horizons, is entitled "Lisette's Dream." Lisette is the old wife of a farmer of the Jura, who has grown up among the occupations of the dairy and the kitchen, without newspapers, and, virtually, with no literature except the Bible. "The revolution of '89 she remembered it not overmuch; its terrible echoes had but beat feebly against the strong wall of the Jura with its solid courses. All this riot that is let loose in France, the days of July, and so many other glorious ones, the cannonades of the risings, and the shouts for the Republic, and the acclamations that welcomed the Empire, all died away upon the moss of the woods, among the leaves of the beeches. The wailings of the wind which sweeps through the firs have a louder voice, a never-dying moan, which rise above all others. Higher than the glorious country she dwelt in, beyond the limits of actual life, a world lay open before Lisette. It had unfolded itself from her earliest years. It was the Hebrew world. There the caravans of camels, with the Ishmaelite merchants, passed through der a softer breeze which had wooed the he taken ?' Lisette was silent, collecting flowers of the pomegranate. Then it was herself; a divine light rolled away the shadSinai smoking; it was Moses, his face shin- ows upon her brow. Neither the wide road ing with a strange brightness, breaking the nor the terrible mountain-course; is it not tables of the law before the frantic people so, Lisette?' Lisette looked at me, her as they danced." But a woman whose vis-beautiful black eyes kindled, the soft and ion is thus fixed upon the unsubstantial mem- subtle smile played upon her lips. 'He beories of the past is not likely to be careless lieved,' she said. That day we talked no of the future; and precisely because Lisette more philosophy." is ignorant of the world, "the great prob- Those who analyze this story will find it lem of eternity remains unchangingly before difficult to believe that any part of it is inher, one side lighted up by faith, the other vention. In the quaint mixture of sublime darkened by doubt." At last she is troubled and homely illustration, the pilgrimage by a dream. She seems to be walking on along the broad and narrow path, the irrethe grass by the side of a dusty road on sistible fate that urges the wayfarers, and the which rich and poor are going forward, like palace four-square like the city of the New the crowd of a market-day. She cannot Jerusalem, while all along heaven is conexplain to herself the secret of her haste or ceived as a great house, and its guardian as the end of her journey. Near her is a rug-an old woman, it recalls more than anything ged mountain-path, the course of a torrent, the old Norse legends which grew up in the in which two or three wayfarers are sadly fusing time of paganism and Christianity. picking their steps among the stones and Here, naturally, the Christian conception bushes. They seem to look wistfully towards predominates, and there is nothing grotesque Lisette, yet not enviously, but as if pitying in the idea that underlies the story. From her and desiring her companionship; she the thought of God's infinite mercy to the tries to join them, but the stones slip under soul, Madame de Gasparin sometimes passes her feet; she stumbles and is disheartened. to the artistic view of Christianity, as the She returns to the old track with a weight one beautiful and pure element in coarse and on her heart. Presently, she seems to un- ignoble lives. In the story of "A Poor derstand that they are all travelling towards Boy" she describes with exquisite yet tendeath. She looks round and finds that the der humor the awkward and dull boy of the crowd has disappeared, that the mountain- village, half-witted, except that he can work course is no longer visible, that she is alone and keep from falling into the fire, the butt on a trackless expanse of turf, with a great of his schoolfellows, despised and loathed square house before her, its walls of gold by his father, who thinks him a discredit to glittering like the midday sun, and the red the family; in the days of his health dragged light of the west streaming through its crys- into mischief by his comrades for the mere tal windows upon the turf. At one of these pleasure of exposing him; later on, cuffed windows, an old woman, gray-haired, dressed and worked hard, cowering for hours in the in black silk, with a mild yet stern expres- corner when he is at home; and at last sion, is sitting and spinning. Lisette ap- slowly dying under ill-usage and hard livproaches and cries out to her. "You have ing. Yet that boy having taken the Bible deceived yourself," is the answer; "you have on faith, as he has taken all other knowlnot taken the right road; you cannot enter edge from his mother, believes in Christ, not in, my daughter." She resumes her knit- as an abstraction, but as a friend, as one ting, and Lisette seems, in her dream, to who has borne hunger and insult, who has fall as one dead. Neither can she shake off touched the leper, who is his brother as the impression when she awakes: "the abject well as his God, with whom he does not feel fear of the slave palsies her heart." Mad- awkward. So skilful are the touches, that ame de Gasparin does not attempt to argue we get to identify the human element in with her, but she reminds her of the day Ulysses with the germ of religious ideality. when three men hung together upon the In another story-that of "The Sculptor cross, and when Jesus declared God's par--a starving man of genius is married to a don to the penitent thief. "That thief vulgar and affected woman, "playing comentered in, Lisette. What road, then, had edy in earnest." "She talked about Provi dence, about the Supreme Being; she was a helpless wreck, upon the waves. Here sailrich in pious twaddle. He coughed, looked ors are blaspheming; now a boat puts off, at me, and turned away." He is silent and his wife's seducer are among the resthroughout on religious matters, but we feel cued, and leaves his victim to her fate; instinctively that the reserved gentleman, there a missionary is announcing God's absorbed in moulding plaster, is the true promises to the last congregation he will exemplar of Christianity, and has higher exhort. Deserted, infamous, miserable, the moral experiences than his garrulous vulgar wife. he must forgive, and see forgiven. The next scene is in the backwoods of America, where an angry crowd is about to lynch the seducer, Martial, for new crimes. Victor hurries to his side and urges him to repent. The miserable man shrinks away in shame and despair when Victor's guide approaches, and shows him the pale face and bleeding hands that were seen on Calvary. The man's heart heaves with a sob of penitence. Thus the life has found its completion; good has triumphed finally over evil; and the shining shores of heaven with its white-robed people holding palm-branches open before the dreamer's eye. He is one of the heavenly company. woman turns to him who saved the Magdalene; the words of pardon seem to burn In one part of Vesper, Madame de Gas- within her, "tears flow over her cheeks. parin rises above the level of common life Jesus, Jesus! A flame, a beauty, a smile to parable. The story of "Emmanuel" is light up her face." A cry of joy rises above an answer to Mr. Hawthorne's "Goodman the waves, as the ship suddenly settles down. Brown," written, as Madame de Gasparin Victor's heart seems to break. But there bitterly puts it, "to establish the universal is still something left for him; one whom reign of Satan," as if life were in very earnest a witches' carnival, with Satan swaying the hearts of those who seem noblest and purest. In "Emmanuel," a drunken degraded man is leaving his home in despair; his wife, seduced by a disloyal friend, taunts him from the window, and bids him kill himself if he dare. He staggers down the streets, and is about to plunge headlong into the muddy waters of the Seine, when he feels himself held back by an arm stronger than his own. He is led away, and gradually the wild whirl of his thoughts is quieted, and scenes too real to be dreams pass before him. He seems to have left the street, to be travelling through a new country, hill and valley, with a starry heaven overhead. The prayers he has prayed at his mother's knee throng upon him, pleasant faces of his childhood re-appear, the Bible he has thumbed and read as a boy opens again before his eyes. Gradually the false friends of his manhood come on the scene. But all their surroundings are changed. The sceptic, whose pitiless scoffs undermined his faith, is kneeling and praying the prayer of the publican. His wife-now she seems to come towards him, but she disappears again. Is there no mercy for her? His guide bids him wait. A young girl passes; the daughter whom Victor allowed to grow up among brutal men and loose words, appears modest Terrible Paradise" and on "Personal and reserved, holding on her arm her mother's aged father, once a hoary buffoon, and now in all the tranquil dignity of old age. But his wife? Victor no longer thinks of her with passion or bitterness, but her name is graven on his heart ineffaceably. Suddenly he seems to be on the shores of the sea. An emigrant ship in the distance is tossing, Great as the beauty of this last story is, there is too much suddenness in some of the changes, to be quite natural or satisfactory. We are apt to distrust the pleas for mercy that are raised "between the saddle and the ground." But the faith that looks upon love as the one true and abiding power, the universal law in which death is swallowed up, has a logic of its own which we cannot question. Nor does Madame de Gasparin, in fact, hold that the present life is without influence upon the future, or that we shall not carry our acts and words with us into eternity. Two of her most beautiful chapters in the Heavenly Horizons are on the Identity." She protests against the conception that there are "two worlds altogether different, two peoples absolutely strange to one another," or that heaven is to be peopled with rows of zeros. "Dazzling as you may make the Void, if it is always the Void there is an end of personality-where individual life is extinguished and absorbed. I see : nothing but an abyss. Did I fathom it for | alone, known only to myself and God, reages, I should ascend again in the same main erect among the ruins of the world. luminous column, forever lost in it." She The idea is immoral and mad-as the loss analyzes with exquisite scorn the paradise of of identity, as the loss of memory. In fine, painters, "a liquid blue gradually lighting this is only the old empirical method fire up," and peopled with "glorified figures and the sword. Let us hew down, let us attitudinizing on a pair of wings; " every-burn, let us destroy: it is more easy to govwhere "the same look, the same smile, the ern desolation than life." From our point same lips half-opened in the same ecstasy." of view it is only weakening arguments like She is not dazzled by Dante's magnificent these when Madame de Gasparin proceeds style to admire the spheres that circle in a to prove from the Bible that Moses and serene atmosphere, and the companies of Elias were recognized at the transfiguration, the blest wheeling round in a holy transport or that the saints who came out of the graves and chanting praise. She asks if "the dis- after the resurrection and went into the holy tant gleam of this glory can dry our tears city, had preserved the semblance of their on earth." As a matter of justice she can- former selves. But little points of detail do not understand the reward of a future life not affect her final conclusion, that "the when there is no person to be rewarded. river of Lethe does not water the Christian Stronger still on questions of the heart, she Paradise." Only the weaknesses, the degraasks what heaven can give her if it cannot dation, and the sins of our past life shall not give back her memories. "I have seen a rise again with us. It is one of the stranfather depart; I am to find a nameless being gest and grandest features in this "Divina in his place. All my life has been blended Commedia” of a Calvinistic poet, that Hell with the life of a friend; nothing of our old is nowhere denied, nowhere asserted, and fondness is to remain. I shall take my place nowhere seen. as a stranger by the side of strangers." "I' awhile associated with the rose; thence I partook of the sweetness of my companion, but otherwise I am the vile earth I seem." MEN KISSING EACH OTHER IN THE STREETS. |plied, "I was a worthless piece of clay, but for -In turning over the leaves of the 3d volume of my Diary, I find the following extract from Evelyn's Diary and Correspondence, vol. iv. p. 43. In his letter to Mrs. Owen he informs her: comes the passage frequently quoted, to the effect that the speaker, although "not the rose, has lived beside the rose"? There is a somewhat similar sentence in the 47th Apologue of the 11th chapter, where the grass, with which a bouquet of roses had been tied, is made to say, "Though I have not the loveliness of the rose, am I not grass from the But neither of these garden where it grew!" passages is quite parallel with the verse so often alluded to. J. E. T. -Notes and Queries. THE LAUGH OF A CHILD.— "I love it, I love it; the laugh of a child, bell, There is an expression resembling it in the Mocaddamah, or introduction to the Gulistan of Sadi; where, alluding to the patronage which Or the music that dwells in the heart of a shell; the poet had received from the sovereign, he illustrates its influence on his verses by the in-Oh! the laugh of a child, so wild and so free, cident of his having been handed in the bath a Is the merriest sound in the world for me." piece of scented clay, which he thus apostro- Some years ago I copied the above from a phized: "Art thou ambergris or musk, for I am lady's album; but whether or not there were charmed with thy grateful odor?" and it re-more stanzas, I cannot say.-Notes and Queries. 1 From the Saturday Review. THE HISTORY OF THE DANCE.* |by the anecdote recorded, on the apochryphal authority of Bourgoing, of the trial of THERE is no art so fallen from its high the fandango before the Roman consistory. estate as that of dancing. A formal history | It was resolved that this seductive dance was of it seems now-a-days almost a curiosity of a disgrace to so religious a land as Spain, literature, to be compared only to a History and must be prohibited to the faithful. The of Pitch and Toss, or a Treatise on Aunt consistory was assembled; the excommuniSally. It is difficult to imagine that the cation was drawn up; the solemn sanction uncomfortable struggle with overpowering was on the point of being appended which numbers, in which the frequenters of Lon- was to have sent every fandango dancer to don balls spend their evenings, is the repre- the cells of the Inquisition, when one of the sentative of an art which boasts of an ancient cardinals suggested that no one ought to be pedigree and many renowned professors. condemned unheard, and that, before the M. Czerwinski details, with all the ardor excommunication was launched, the cardiwhich belongs to the stanch votary of a de-nals ought to witness for themselves that caying cause, the former glories of his now which they were going to condemn. The neglected study; and many might be added suggestion appeared sound, and a couple of to those that he has collected. Eschylus, skilful Spanish dancers were sent for to perSophocles, Epaminondas, were distinguished form in the sacred presence. The dancers dancers in their day. Socrates and Plato came, and began their performance. But not only danced themselves, but applied very the austerity of the assembled divines was unpolite language to those who were too ignot proof against the charms of the exhibinorant to follow their example. The in- tion which they had met to proscribe. As stances of David and the daughter of Hero- its successive fascinations were unfolded, dias show the influence the art had among the Jews. Nor did it lose its favor with the early Christians, among whom so much of Jewish thought and feeling survived. Gregory Thaumuturgus introduced it into divine service. St. Basil strongly recommends the art to his hearers, telling them that it will be their principal occupation in heaven, and therefore they had better practise it betimes on earth. Scaliger even deduces from the custom of employing it in divine service the name of præsules, which was given to the bishops deriving it a præsiliendo, from the fact of their "skipping first," or being foremost in the dance at the head of their clergy. It is a thousand pities that this edifying practice of the Primitive Church has been discontinued in our degenerate day. That peculiar moral malady which may best be described as "white-cravatism," and which commits such fearful ravages among our more dignified clergy, would be an impossibility if the bishops were bound in virtue of their office to skip round their cathedrals, footing it at the head of a well-trained corps de ballet of rural deans. The only instance of a similar performance on the part of great ecclesiastical dignitaries in modern times is furnished Geschichte der Tanzkunst. Von Albert Czerwinski. Leipzig: Weber. London: Williams and Norgate. 1862. their ascetic countenances lightened up, they monial as if it had occurred in a sermon. |