really less scholastic than suggested by the deeper insight of the poetic mind. The most significant passage, however, is found in the famous words at the beginning of the Vita Nuova, which fix his first sight of Beatrice when he was nine years old. "And since," he closes, "to dwell upon the passions and actions of such early youth appeareth like telling an idle tale, I will leave them, and, passing over many things which might be drawn from the original where these lie hidden, I will come to those words which are written in my memory under large paragraphs." In these last words is apparent Dante's own judgment upon the worth of his recollections of childhood: one page only in that book of his memory he deems worthy of regard, the page upon which fell the image of Beatrice. It will be said with truth that the childhood of Dante and Beatrice is in reality the beginning of maturity, for it is counted only as the initiation of a noble passion. The time, indeed, had not yet come in the history of human life when the recollection of that which is most distinctive of childhood forms the basis of speculation and philosophic dream. The absence of childhood from the visions of Dante is a negative witness to the absence from the world, in the age prior to the Renaissance, of hope and of simple faith and innocence. Dante's faint recognition of these qualities throws them back into a quickly forgot ten and outgrown childhood. The lisp ing child becomes the greedy worldling, the cruel and unloving man, and the tyranny of an empire of souls is hinted at in the justification by the poet of the presence of innocent babes in Paradise; they are there by the interposition of a 1 C. E. Norton's translation. VOL. LV. NO. 331. 40 sacrificial act. The poet argues to still the doubts of men at finding these children in Paradise. It would almost seem as if the words had been forgotten which characterized heaven through the very image of childhood. Indeed, it is not to be wondered at that childhood was little regarded by an age which found its chief interest in a thought of death. "Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio," we are reminded by Mr. Pater, "gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the plague in a country house." The great Florentine work was executed under this dominant thought; nevertheless, an art which is largely concerned about tombs and sepulchral monuments implies an overweening pride in life and a weightier sense of the years of earth. The theology which had furnished the panoply within which the human soul was fighting its battle emphasized the idea of time, and made eternity itself a prolongation of human conditions. The imagination, at work upon a future, constructed it out of the hard materials of the present, and was always looking for some substantial bridge which should connect the two worlds; seeing decay and change here, it transferred empires and powers to the other side of the gulf, and sought to reerect them upon an everlasting basis. Such thought had little in common with the hope, the fearlessness, the faith, of childhood, and thus childhood as an image had largely faded out of art and literature. literature. One only great exception there was,- -the representation in art of the child Jesus; and in the successive phases of this representation may be read a remarkable history of the human soul. Horace E. Scudder. MADAME MOHL, HER SALON AND HER FRIENDS. FIFTH PAPER. IN 1870 M. and Madame Mohl went to England for their annual visit, which was prolonged, as in the case of so many others, by the outbreak of the FrancoGerman war. Madame Mohl's anxiety all through this terrible time was intense. Her friends left nothing undone to make her sojourn among them agreeable in itself, but she remained bitterly sad at heart. M. Mohl was still more So. It would have been unnatural, and indeed impossible, that he, a German by blood, birth, and early associations, should not rejoice with his fatherland, should not vibrate to the triumph of German armies, however sincerely he might, on the other hand, mourn for the misfortunes of France, and feel for the defeat of her brave soldiers. Blood is thicker than water, and no adoption, no grafted affections, no sense of gratitude for obligations generously conferred, could stifle the voice of nature, and make Julius Mohl, the son of German parents, with unadulterated German blood in his veins, curse the triumph of German arms and bewail like a Frenchman the glory of German warriors and statesmen. That he ever uttered a word which could be construed into satisfaction at the disasters of France no one who knew him ought to have credited; yet there were some persons who reported that both he and his wife, who owed so much to France and French society, had turned against their adopted country in her hour of sorrow, and had nothing but hard words for her. These stories found credence in certain quarters. It is probable that those who repeated them were glad to shift upon M. and Madame Mohl the unpatriotic things they were ashamed to say themselves. That Madame Mohl gave small quarter to the criminal blunders and the ignorance of some of the French leaders we can well imagine; that she poured out vitriol in gallons on the head of Celui-ci, and denounced him in the strongest language to be found in the dictionary, we can also readily believe; but that she rejoiced in the downfall of France, and turned against her in her humiliation, no one who had any knowledge of her character ought for a moment to have believed. When Madame Cheuvreux met M. Mohl, on his return to Paris after the siege, she accosted him with, "Well, my dear friend, you must be sorry that you ever made yourself a Frenchman!" He replied unhesitatingly, "No, I am not sorry. If it were to be done over again, I would do it." In speaking to Madame d'Abbadie, on returning from a visit to Germany some time after the war, Madame Mohl said, "Nations squint in looking at one another; we must discount what Germany and France say of each other." She herself called for a liberal discount in construing her exaggerated language into its real meaning. For instance, when M. Forgues was translating Dickens for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and making large cuttings out of the original by order of the editor, Madame Mohl was furious, and, meeting Madame Cheuvreux, she burst out, "Your friend Forgues is a canaille! He is destroying Dickens. I don't ever want to set eyes on him again!" A person who distributed epithets with such odd percep tion of their value was not to be taken au sérieux in moments of abnormal excitement. Both in praise and blame she used words with very various degrees of precision. "Come and dine to meet General Fox," she wrote one day to Ampère. "He can't bear Cousin, but you are his passion!" We cannot wonder if, in her excitement during the lamentable progress of the war, she sometimes talked in a way that led the uninitiated to suppose that she was denouncing the whole nation, when she only meant to denounce the men who were bringing all this misery upon her. The moment peace was signed M. Mohl went back to Paris. His wife was to have followed him in a few days; but the commune broke out, and made this impossible. The interval of separation was a time of cruel anxiety to her. The accounts from Paris were more horrible than those which had been coming throughout the siege. The city, already battered by German artillery, was now a prey to the more savage horrors of civil war; and many of those dear to Madame Mohl were, she believed, exposed with her husband to violent death at the hands of a populace exasperated to madness by the strain of hunger and nervous excitement. For the first time in her life, it occurred to Madame Mohl that her husband might die, and leave her behind him; and from the moment this possibility presented itself to her she was half crazed with apprehension. Nevertheless, she went about her life as usual, never parading this distress of mind, but doing what she could to escape from it; so that those who met her in society, at dinners and garden-parties, the centre of attention, and always racy and amusing, thought she must be heartlessly indifferent to her husband's danger. Mrs. Ritchie was one of the few English friends who saw M. Mohl when he was alone in the Rue du Bac, while it was being threatened on all sides by the rebel mob. "During the commune," she says, "I went to see M. Mohl with my cousin, Miss Ritchie, to beg him to come away with us: but he described his quiet life, his daily visits, unmolested, to the Bibliothèque; he pointed to the gardens from his window, to his books, and shook his head at the idea of coming away. He then began to praise his two maids. (They were the same who were so faithful to Madame Mohl after his death.) Think of those two impossible women,' he said, 'here all through the siege, half starved, and saying to me when I returned, "You will find the preserves quite safe, sir, in the cupboard. We only used two pots." I felt inclined to break every pot on the shelf, I was so angry with them!'" 6 When the insurrection was crushed, and the gates were opened, Madame Mohl started off to Paris with Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta. Her joy at being at home again was exuberant as a child's. She skipped along the streets, and was in raptures at the sight of everything. But her dear, beautiful Paris was never the same place to her after 1870. Perhaps it has never been the same place to any of us. Society was broken up. Streets and palaces that were burnt down have been rebuilt, most of them; but the social edifice, once destroyed, is not so easily reconstructed. Even so wide and heterogeneously composed a circle as that of the Rue du Bac was snapped asunder at too many points for the chain to relink itself again; not, at least, for a long time to come. Many old friends had left Paris, and gone to live in the provinces; some remained in their country places; foreigners who had taken root in France folded their tents, and went away for good and all. Everything was changed. The pleasant place was no more the same, because so many of the pleasant people were gone. M. Mohl never recovered from the shock and strain of that dreadful year. He was a man to suffer deeply from an impersonal grief. He took the downfall of France greatly to heart; and it was a sharp pain to him, too, to find that his German birth was now remembered where it had formerly been forgotten. He loved his adopted country better and more wisely than many born Frenchmen, and it was bitter to him to find that many doubted this, and that his German origin made a barrier now between him and some of them. Family afflictions followed soon upon this national sorrow. His brother's death was a heavy blow. His health began to fail. Every one saw this but his wife. He was ten years younger than she, and the possibility of his dying first had never occurred to her, except during that anxious time when he was alone in Paris. She saw him suffering and growing more and more feeble, and she was very unhappy, but not the least alarmed. She had entire confidence in Dr. Richet's skill to restore him in due course to health. "I owe an everlasting gratitude to Dr. Richet, whose science and incomparable skill have made the poor cripple walk," she writes to Madame Cheuvreux, and announces triumphantly that M. Mohl had been out to pay a visit, "in spite of his legs." Later on, when every one but herself felt that there was not a shadow of hope, she writes, in answer to the repeated invitation to Stors: 1 "I am looking forward to a fête in being amongst you all, and hope to get back a little of my entrain near you, whom Heaven has endowed with the power of putting every one about you in good spirits." But her blindness did not alter the fact that M. Mohl was going from her. One morning Mrs. Wynne Finch met the doctor coming out of the house, and learned from him that the end was close at hand; it might be in a few days, perhaps sooner. She found Madame Mohl just as usual, quite unaware of the truth. There was something dreadful and pathetic in this unconsciousness. It seemed 1 Madame Cheuvreux's country place, near Paris. cruel to undeceive her, and still more cruel not to do so. Mrs. Wynne Finch, with the courage of a true friend, resolved to tell her the truth. She broke it to her as tenderly as she could. "Indeed, indeed, there is danger, my dear friend. The time is very short, and it would be cruel and selfish, I feel, not to tell you." At first the poor soul did She not, then would not, understand. shrank away angrily from the merciful cruelty of the revelation. "It is not true! I don't believe it! There is no danger; they never said there was any danger!" she cried, and, turning away, like a vexed child, she ran out of the room, back to M. Mohl, "reeling with the shock," as she afterwards confessed. But her eyes were opened. The moment they fell upon him she saw that he was dying. She never left his side again for a moment. She watched by him all that night, holding his hand, while he struggled for breath. Sometimes he stroked her face. "That stroking has been an ineffable comfort to me," she wrote, a year later, to Mrs. Wynne Finch: "it was an endearment when he could not speak, the only sign he could give me of his affection, and that he knew it was I who was beside him." He died in the night of the 3d of January, 1876. During that last day, when she watched him passing away, conscious now that he was going from her, Madame Mohl found courage to ask her husband about his last wishes concerning certain things he had at heart: amongst others, what he should like her to do with his dear books, his most precious possession. "Shall I give them in your name to the library at Stuttgart?" she said. But he replied, "No; sell them here. That is the way to make books useful; they go to those who want them." She had often heard him say the same thing. He had spent forty years in collecting his Oriental library, and used to declare, "It is impossible to write on those subjects without having in possession certain books." Three days after his death, two booksellers from Leipsic wrote to Madame Mohl, offering to purchase the library; but she would not hear of letting it leave Paris. She had the books sold at the house as soon as it was possible. The sale and its inevitably painful details excited and distressed her to frenzy. ment for science and learning and giving room,” etc. Her one interest in life henceforth was her husband's memory and work. Her grief for him was inconsolable. It had in it something of the child's inability to comprehend death. She could not realize that he had gone away, never to come back to her. She had for a long time the forlorn look that made some one who saw her passing in the street say, "Poor old soul, she looks like a lost dog, going about searching for his master." "I suffered so intensely," she wrote to Madame Scherer, some days later, "at seeing the brutal manner in which those creatures kicked my dear husband's books about when taking them away, I was so Some time after M. Mohl's death, she miserable at having had that beast of a came upon a pocket-book of his, carebookseller to manage it, that, after the fully tied up and put away in a drawer dreadful day in which they finished the in his room. She was in the act of sack of my house, I begged none of my opening it, when a sudden terror stayed friends would speak to me of the trans- her hand. "Suppose," she thought, "it action. I was in a state of irritability should contain a remembrance of some nothing can describe, and obliged to repeat to myself that I had done it because he had told me, and I could not disobey him. Since then, two or three friends have come to tell me about it; but I begged them to give me no details. My feeling was as if my dear husband was being dissected. I can't write to you without tears. "But I know I am like a creature without a skin. I ought to have known the public by this time. What is so disgusting, too, is that, after spending his life in setting up this odious Asiatic Society, spreading knowledge and spending his mind, they won't give to it a lodging big enough to place the books! There was one in the Palais Mazarin; it has been divided, and M. Regnier, who does his best, tells me half the books are packed in cases, for want of room. My diningroom is crammed with the pamphlets of the Société, which my dear husband lodged here. I have asked Regnier where I should send them. He says, 'Pray, keep them; we have not room.' The English friends of my dear husband are astounded. They had heard so much of the liberality of the French govern other woman, She |