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suit England do not suit France, and vice versa-so that octroi duties would drive Englishmen to rebellion, as turnpike tolls would Frenchmen-so that we could as little bear a tobacco monopoly as France an income-tax. But for those who know anything of Indian history, the answer is plainer still. Northern India has capital; Southern, with a few exceptions, has not. The Madras Presidency,-though now, thank God, rapidly recovering under a milder system, has for half a century been drained by the force-pump of ryotwar, or annual, settlements of the land revenue, except in those few districts formerly attached to Bengal, where a permanent settlement has been allowed to subsist. These being accepted,unless at her capital, in the persons of a few native chieftains exceptionally treated, and in those of her money-lenders, she has no taxable incomes. Still less, as the above-quoted letter indicates, has she trades which would bear a licence-duty. The reverse is the case in Bengal, where the permanent settlement has favoured the accumulation of capital-in the northern provinces, where a third system of land revenue has at least not wholly destroyed it. Let a few years pass, and out of her now accruing income Madras will have accumulated capital sufficient to bear Mr. Wilson's burthens. At present, they would stop the very power of accumulation, and thus run counter to the very principles of his own budget.

A singular want of judgment, it may be observed, has hitherto attended the recall of India's governors. Such a punishment, or its equivalent, has invariably reached those who were among her ablest and best. Lord Macartney

lost the governor-generalship because he would not take it without the power of overruling his council, which was straightway granted to his successor. Lord Wellesley was worried out of office by "the ignominious tyranny of Leadenhall Street." Lord William Bentinck was recalled from Madras for not having prevented a plot which never existed. Sir Charles Metcalfe was not suffered to retain permanently the governor-generalship. Lord Ellenborough was recalled, after saving an empire which Lord Auckland had done his best to lose. He lost office in the Board of Control for writing a despatch which, as we know now from Mr. Russell's Diary, embodied the universal feeling of all on the spot who were qualified to judge; the spirit of which was, in practice, carried out from the first out of sheer necessity, and has eventually received the most signal homage through the acts of Lord Canning himself. Charles Trevelyan now adds his name to the noble list of India's luckless ones. He may well be proud of his company.

NOTE.

Sir

Through an untoward misprint, the word "Pantheiism" was, in the last sentence but one of Mr. Ludlow's article on "Spiritualistic Materialism" (vol. ii. p. 51), printed as " Pantheism," and the greater portion of the impres sion went off before the error could be remedied. The phrase should stand thus:

"But against such Pantheism, overt or latent, in the gristle or in the bone, there is no better preservative than the Puntheiism, if I may use the term, of Christianity."

The writer would not, but for what has happened, have deemed it necessary to point out that the distinction he sought to establish was between the looking upon all as God (Tav-Oeov), and upon all as from God, or divine (παν-θειον).

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

JULY, 1860.

SWISS-FRENCH LITERATURE: MADAME DE GASPARIN.

BY J. M. LUDLOW.

THE surface of the earth has goldfields intellectual, as it has material. Take a map of Switzerland, draw a line SS.W. from about Bâle to Martigny, not straight, but incurved so as to follow the valleys of the Upper Birse, the middle Aare, and the Saane, and you will have marked out one of such, of which the Eldorado diggings, or richest nugget-nest, will be found at the southwestern extremity. Within that field, about as large as Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex together, more of intellectual power has been developed than in many a great empire; in that Eldorado corner a good three-fifths of the whole has taken its rise. The tract in question embraces the Jura chain and the greater part of the valley between its eastern slopes and the western ones of the Alps, so far as the Gallic tide has extended until met and arrested by the Teutonic. With an outlying district or two, such as the valley of the Upper Rhône as far as Visp, it represents French Switzerland.

Strange to say, indeed, this gold-field is but of comparatively recent discovery. Three centuries alone have seen its treasures brought to light. Nothing in the earlier history of Switzerland foretold its splendours. The great names of that earlier history are all German. From Tell to Zwingli the Teutonic race has a monopoly of Swiss glory. Basel-not yet Bâle-is in some respects the Geneva of No. 9.-VOL. II.

the early half of the sixteenth century, -a centre of free thought. From Froben's presses are poured forth the works of Erasmus, of Luther; Erasmus comes to die beside his friend. French Switzerland only wakens up from the day when Farel, the restless apostle of French Protestantism, invading Switzerland, carries Neufchâtel as by assault (1530), and on his return from a synod of the Waldenses of Piedmont, stops at Geneva (1532), where in three years (1532-5) the bishop's yoke is broken from off the city, and political independence is the fruit of religious reform. Farel is succeeded by those other great Frenchmen, Calvin and De Bèze, and under them grows up that marvellous theocracy which, however stern and oppressive it may show itself to us under some of its aspects, yet made Geneva one of the very centres of Eu ropean thought. Think of one small town having given in three centuries, to physical science Saussure, Deluc, De Candolle, Huber; Charles Bonnet to metaphysics; to jurisprudence, Burlamaqui, Delolme, Dumont (not to speak of our Romilly, a Genevese watchmaker's son); to history, Sismondi, Guizot; Necker and Sismondi again to political economy; to diplomacy, Albert Gallatin; to literature proper, Rousseau and Madame de Stael,-besides the Diodatis, Leclercs, Senebiers, Mallets, Pictets. and other miscellaneous celebrities.

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Protestantism, therefore, may be said to have created French Switzerland; Protestantism is that which has made it entitled to stand out before Europe as the representative of all, Switzerland. It is easy to see why. If there be one marked characteristic of the Swiss race, it is its individualism. Inhabiting for the most part a very thinly populated country, always at war, so to speak, with nature, since even his sunniest valleys are swept by the wintry mountain blasts, the Switzer is obliged to earn his own living, to fight his own way. He is essentially a worker and a fighter; shrewd, prudent, determined; endowed with more good sense than genius; his thrift shading easily into avarice; a trader even when he fights. Now the Calvinistic reformation is the most individualizing of all the theological movements of the sixteenth century, and it was thus admirably adapted to the tendencies of the Swiss mind, whilst the position of Geneva, as a harbour for French Protestantism whenever expelled by fire and sword from its own country, and thereby in constant antagonism with Romanist France, Romanist France, tended to develop this character to the uttermost. Not, indeed, but what the Protestant cantons of German Switzerland have always held a respectable place in the intellectual annals of Europe.

Haller, of Berne; J. von Müller, of Schaffhausen; and, above all the sons of Zurich, the "Athens of German Switzerland," the Gessners, Lavater, Tschudi, Zimmermann, with Zchokke in our own days, give to that district quite a fair average of literary and scientific merit. But already on the borderland between Gaul and German, at Bâle (which now every year becomes more French), the Bernouillis and Euler are French in language; and it is unquestionable that to French Switzerland belong those few really great Swiss names which stamp themselves upon their age, the Rousseaus, De Staels, Guizots. Romanism, moreover, continued to cling to the rock-summits of German Switzerland, harbouring with it ignorance and intellectual torpor, at the

very heart of the old Teutonic nucleus of the land. And thus it came to pass, as I said, that wherever Swiss individualism had to speak out before Europe, it did so mainly in French.

Conversely again, we need not be surprised to find that if there be one character which distinguishes SwissFrench literature and science, it is precisely this individualism. Here we find ourselves dealing with men who think for themselves. Their very mediocrity becomes thus original by the force of circumstances. Was there ever a heavier writer, a more mediocre thinker than Necker? And yet that Genevese banker, standing in his plebeian respectability amid the brilliant French court, daring to declare, in an age of prodigality and insolvency, that economy is a public duty, that it is the business of kings to rule for the good of their subjects, has an originality which it is impossible to mistake in contemporary pictures, and becomes thereby for a time. the very idol of a nation. Dumont is not a man of very great genius; but he has the originality to discover Bentham, who for twenty years perhaps is scarcely known except in Dumont's paraphrases.

These Swiss-French have thus, in the modern history of France herself, an importance which no impartial observer should overlook. They represent that principle of individualism which the French Reformation tended perhaps unduly to develop, which generations of despotism, from Richelieu downwards, took every pains to trample out. The type-man of them all,-the man whose value we Englishmen are least apt to appreciate, is Rousseau. What is Rousseau's essential function in the eighteenth century? Above all, to stand up against that last despot whom a Frenchman will yet obey, when he has cast off every other yoke,-King Wit, then lording it over Europe under the name of Voltaire. I know of no greater marvel in history than the influence of Rousseau. In an essentially spirituel age, without a particle of esprit, -in an essentially courtly age, a mere

boor,-devoid of every worldly advantage,-incapable of joining or leading school, sect, or party,-he becomes, he, Jean Jacques the misanthrope, a very power in the world, balancing even that of the lord of Ferney. No one can fairly judge Rousseau except in contrast with Voltaire. The relation between them is that of absolute antagonism. The one is essentially positive, the other essentially negative. The life of the one is one long struggle-oh, through what hideous failures often!-to do good. The highest efforts of the other are but to undo evil-with what noble success indeed sometimes, let the name of Calas testify.

It is easy for us to rail at Rousseau's "rose-pink" sentiment, at the immorality of Julie or St. Preux. But place them beside the "Pucelle," and then see to what immorality that tale of passion really was the antidote. When shall we practically learn that God's medicine is not more timid than man's that He too knows in what proportions even poisons may be used to check or quell disease? Unwholesome as Rousseau's works may be for the nineteenth century, they were priceless for the eighteenth. Voltaire was for ever crushing out all enthusiasm ; Rousseau for ever kindling it; Voltaire was essentially an intellectual aristocrat; Rousseau, the ex-lackey, never ceased to be one of the many. Whatever of noble and generous, of loving and self-sacrificing, lived amid the fires of the French revolution and survived them, one man above all others has France to thank for it under God, Rousseau the Genevese.

Nor would it, I believe, be sufficient to give Switzerland the credit of Rousseau's influence, her native-born son. It is characteristic of all countries with strongly-marked natural features, of all nations with strongly-marked generic qualities, that they impress a perceptible influence upon the guests who come to sojourn among them. Neither Calvin nor De Bèze would probably have been in France what they were at Geneva. Still less, I believe, would Voltaire have been anywhere else what he was at Ferney. To that

period belong the purest pages of his history, such as that story of Calas to which I have referred. The persevering pluck which he displayed in it would have been physically impossible in Paris. I believe it would have been no less beyond his moral reach amidst the frivolous corruption of French society. There blows through it all, as it were, a waft of free mountain air.

Between Rousseau and the next great name which I shall have to mention, Switzerland gives to France one no longer of splendour, but of infamy. This time, however, it is right to say that it is not free Geneva, but Neufchâtel, completely under the thumb of wooden Friedrichian Prussianism, which sends forth the most hideous figure of the French Revolution, Marat. And yet I do not know but what, even in this portent of humanity, we may recognise the distinctive individualism of the Swiss character. Mediocre in all things, the time exhibits no other instance of mediocrity so self-sufficient, and rising to such importance. The man thoroughly dares to be that which he is-hence his power. Marat with his greasy cap and scurvied frame is, after all, but the loathsome caricature of Rousseau "the savage," as he was called, and called himself. The peculiarity of both men is that they are always ready to stand defiant against those who are held to be their fellow-combatants. Marat quails as little before Danton or Robespierre, as Rousseau before Voltaire or Diderot.

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But Geneva boasts no such heroes as Marat. Other names are hers. Not to speak of the Dumonts, Clavières, Mallet Dupans, who represent her during the revolutionary crisis,-what Rousseau is in one century, Madame de Stael is at the beginning of the next. need not emulate the admiration of the generation which preceded us for Madame de Stael's writings in themselves. But her historical greatness can, I think, but grow. It is one of contrast, like that of Rousseau. You must measure her by him against whom she measured herself. Only when we have appre

ciated the colossal and yet fascinating greatness of the First Napoleon, as he showed himself, with Greek profile and eagle eye, springing up, as it were, from the ruins, from the ashes of old France, young, beautiful, brave, mighty; in war, driving the nations asunder before his sword; in peace, making the walls of a new social order to rise about him from the ground, as to the sound of some magic lyre, a sort of Phoebus-Ares or Balder-Odin among men,-only then can we discern also the strange greatness of that woman's voice lifted against him in protest, from Coppet or elsewhere; not dwelling on old traditions, like De Maistre or Châteaubriand; not backed, like our English statesmen, by Tory obstinacy and national pride, but singing alone, as it were in the very ears of the despot, the weird and deadly song of the future, the song of Freedom and of Peace, of the fraternal independence of the nations. Very wonderful was the power of that voice. Years after her death it seemed yet to murmur in music round every name that had once been familiar to it; and the selfish and sceptical Benjamin Constant died the object of a nation's reverence because Madame de Stael had once chanced to care for him, and had for a time kindled his dry heart into indignation and eloquence. It is hardly too much to say that the spirit of Madame de Stael was that which presided over that, on the whole, very noble period in the history of French liberalism, its fifteen years of opposition under the government of the Restoration. Nor can we deem her influence wholly extinct so long as a De Broglie thinks and writes, and lives respected. So great is the debt of France to that other noble Genevese.

And what greater name do we find in France, during that period of fifteen years and the next of eighteen which follows it, than that of Guizot? If we look to his worth as a writer, he and that other Swiss (though not by descent), Sismondi, are in truth the fathers, under both its leading aspects, of the present historical school. Sismondi exhibits to

us the patient research into original authorities, without which all historical thought is baseless; Guizot, along with this, that keen questioning of facts till they yield up their inmost meaning, without which historic research remains fruitless. If we look to Guizot's political career, on the other hand,—though the close of it is to me singularly painful and unworthy of him,-who can deny that for some years the Swiss professor had made himself not only the foremost man in France, but one of the two or three foremost in Europe? And if he failed, why was it, but because he stooped from Swiss independence to the practice of Louis Philippian despotism?

Shall we take some less ambitious names, though no less likely to endure? I will single out two, in wholly different spheres: Agassiz, of Fribourg, and Vinet, of Lausanne. The country that has produced two such names in a generation may well rest satisfied. Agassiz, one of the greatest of contemporary naturalists, on whom, by universal consent, the mantle of Cuvier has descended, -Vinet, the real father of modern French religious thought, the most Pascal-like since Pascal of French writers. How many names of mark within their sphere cluster round his the Merle d'Aubignés, Gaussens, Malans, Cellériers, Bonrets, Bosts, Cherbuliez, &c.-is well known to religious readers; whilst from him proceed directly the two most remarkable, though mutually opposed, schools of contemporary French theology, those of De Pressensé and Schèrer. And now there has come forth from the same quarter one who seems destined to exercise, within the sphere of French thought, a religious influence more widespreading, more popular, than any other number of her school, the authoress of the "Horizons Prochains" and the "Horizons Célestes," Madame de Gasparin.

Of this lady herself, it is sufficient to say that she is the wife of Count Agénor de Gasparin, son of that Count de Gasparin who was long a minister under Louis Philippe. M. Agénor de Gasparin was himself for several years a member

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