upon the Jesuits, crowds, such as never had attended a professor before since the days of the middle ages, thronged his lecture-hall even more than that of Quinet, till the two professors grew to be almost a power in the state, and had to be silenced by authority?

The enormous popularity which the lecturer thus reached may be considered as opening the second period of his career. Though not, I repeat it, a genuine historian, yet his works hitherto have all an historical character; they are full of materials for history, historical sketches, curiosities of history. Now, the turbulence of the partisans of monasticism, which had interrupted his and Quinet's courses, seems to have stung him up into a politician, a dealer mainly with the things of the present; and though he may write history socalled (that of the "Revolution," forming the last volumes of his "History of France"), this he will be henceforth above all, not indeed as a partisan, but as one of those who, wandering on the border land between the political and what may be called the psychical realm, contribute often far more powerfully towards impressing a general direction upon the public mind than does the mere politician, who points it to a definite aim. The "Jesuits," which reached four editions in six weeks, "Priests, Women, and Families," the "History of the Revolution," the "People," belong to this period.

Then came the strange downfall of the liberties of France under the weight of a dead man's name, the sudden hushing of her most eloquent voices, except from beyond the sea, at the blare of the imperial trumpet. Michelet was silent, or nearly so, like others for awhile, and then spoke out as a student, not of historic facts, but of actual organisms. His book, "The Bird," opens what may be called the physiological portion of his career. So remarkable a transformation, exhibited by a man on the shady side of fifty, is a singular phenomenon in literary history, and many, foreigners especially, could scarcely believe that there was not a second "J. Michelet"

There was no

at work with his pen. mistaking, however, the artist's hand. "The Bird" displays all the qualities of style, and more than all the poetical fancy, of Michelet's best historical days. It begins by telling "how the author was led to the study of nature." "The "time is heavy, and life, and work, and "the violent catastrophes of the time, "and the dispersion of a world of intelligence in which we lived, and to "which nothing has succeeded. The "rude labours of history had once for "their recreation teaching, which was my friendship. Their halts are now

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only a silence. Of whom should I "ask moral refreshment unless of "nature?" The health of one dear to him, a passionate observer of nature, made him leave Paris, at first for a mere suburban home, from whence he returned to town every day. But the turmoil of the great city, its abortive revolutions, sent him farther off. He took up his quarters near Nantes, and here he wrote the latter part of his "History of the Revolution," already wakening up to the beauty and interest of nature, already longing for leisure to study her. But the climate was too damp, and drove him, in ill-health, further south. He now "placed his moveable nest in a fold of the Apennines, at two leagues of Genoa." And here, with no company but lizards, and living the life of a lizard himself, he felt a revolution take place within him. He seemed to see all living creatures claiming their place in the great democracy. Such, he tells us, was his renovation, "that late vita nuova which gradually brought me to the natural sciences."

"The Bird," however, is still a work of mere natural history rather than of physiology. It deals with the outside of living nature; with form, colour, habits; with these mostly in reference to man as a prototype; whatever of anatomy occurs in it is derived from the study of Dr. Auzoux's models. "The Insect" travels over much of the same ground, though in a lower stratum of life, but opens up another field. The author tells us how he bought a micro

scope, how he placed under it a woman's finger, a spider's leg; how coarse appeared the structure of that which to us is living satin, how the repulsive coarseness of the latter opened out into marvellous beauty. It is from this point that the naturalist grows into the physiologist. The microscope is a cruel teacher; no one who has once experienced the fascination of its powers can stop over outward form, but must pierce the mysteries of structure; and the study of structure, except in a few transparent organisms generally of the lowest class, means disruption, dissection. Whilst even apart from structure, the world of form and life which the microscope unveils to us is one so wellnigh entirely extra-human,-the limbs which unite us to it are so few and so loose, those which unite its members among themselves so many and so prominent, that the temptation is strong for a fervid, fickle mind to be altogether carried away by the new spectacle, to change altogether the pivot of its contemplations; and instead of seeing in the creature the shadow of the man, to see in man henceforth only the more highly organized creature. Hence already in this volume pages painful and repulsive to read.

And now we come to the more essentially physiological works of the exprofessor of history. "L'Amour,"-now at its fourth edition,-represents the climax of this period. I hardly know how to characterize this work fairly for an English public, so immoral would it be if written by an Englishman, so essentially does it require to be judged from a French point of view. I hardly know how even to give an adequate idea of it, so greatly does it depart from any standard within reach of English hands by which it can be decently measured. I am convinced that never was a book written with honester intentions. The writer is full of good impulses; his object, as he sets it forth in the first page of his introduction, is a noble one,- "Moral enfranchisement by true love." That object he seeks to carry out by exhibiting to us the picture of the married life

of a nameless couple, from the weddingday to the grave. The book teems with tender and delicate passages, though placed in startling contact with the coarse and the trivial. There are pages in it which it is impossible to read without emotion. But the whole is sickly; nauseous. As one closes the book, one seems to be coming out of some stifling boudoir, leaving an atmosphere mawkish with the mingled smell of drugs and perfumes, heavy with the deadly steam of life. You miss in the "true love" of the book both the free buoyancy of health, and (except in a page here and there) the noble martyrdom of real suffering. Its aim seems to be to coax men into purity, by showing them a virtue more voluptuous than vice, into tenderness towards woman by dwelling on her infirmities. The whole sense and substance of the book seems to be this,-Given, an enlightened young Frenchman of the nineteenth century, with a competent knowledge of anatomy, a fair income, large ideas of the perfectibility of the species, kindly feelings towards religion in general, and what may be called a bowing acquaintance with the idea of God, on the one hand, and on the other, a sickly Parisian girl, brought up in a Romish convent or quasi-convent,how the one is to make the best of the other?

Looked at in this way-remembering the writer's popularity-not forgetting that he speaks with the authority of sixty years of life, I do not mean to say that the book is not likely to do some good to the class for which it is written. That class is a narrow one. It has been said ere this, in France, that M. Michelet's ideal "woman" would require from 15,000 to 45,000 francs a year to keep her. To the great bulk of the French population his book itself would be as Greek; and, indeed, it is quite amusing to see how entirely the writer ignores the possibility that the red-cheeked country girl, whom he assigns for servant to his ideal couple in their suburban home, should ever have a claim to "true love" on her own account. He admits himself, that whilst

he does not write for the rich, he does not write either "for those who have "no time, no liberty, who are mastered, "crushed by the fatality of circumstances, "those whose unceasing labour regulates "and hastens all their hours. What "advice can one give to those who are "not free?" But the class of men whom he addresses no doubt does exist, and is but too numerous for the health and well-being of the French body-politic; nor are samples of it, God knows, wanting amongst ourselves. It must have startled some of these to be told, by a man whose voice has often charmed them, who is one of themselves by his intellectual training and sympathies, who starts from no old-world notions of right and duty, but from the last new discoveries in medical science, that marriage, and faithful love in marriage, are to give them their "moral enfranchisement." Certainly, as compared with the coarse cynicism, or the still coarser attempts at morality, of the French novel or the French press under the imperial régime, M. Michelet's work, unreadable as it is in the main for Englishwomen,-certainly unfit to be read by English girls,-may well stand out as a very model of purity.

a

The indications indeed, which it gives, of the growth of immorality under that régime tallying as they do entirely with information from other quarters-are most painful. I do not speak of such facts as M. Michelet quotes from statistics, and which any one may verify there, ominous though they be; stationary or decreasing population; an increasing number of young men unfit for military service, marriages rapidly diminishing, widows ceasing to re-marry, female suicides multiplying. Most of these facts might be paralleled elsewhere; some amongst ourselves. I refer to those details, evidently founded upon actual facts, which are given in the chapters entitled "The Fly and the Spider," and "Temptation," as to the corruption of female friendships, the abuse of official power, the utter, expected, absence of moral strength, even in the pure of life.

"For the best, it is through their husband himself that for the most part they are attacked." If he be powerful, M. Michelet shows us "ladies in honourable positions, esteemed, often pious, active in good works, whom she has seen at charitable gatherings," coming to the virtuous wife in order to present some "young son, an inte"resting young man, already capable of "serving the husband, devoted to his "ideas, quite in his line;" who has been "a solitary student," "needs the polish of the world." He shows us female friends assiduously praising the young man into favour; the lady's maid soon breaking the ice, to tell her mistress, whilst doing her hair, that he is dying of love. Formerly, M. Michelet asserts, Lisette had to be bought. No need now. She knows well that the lady being once launched in such adventures, having given a hold upon her, and let a secret be surprised, she herself will be her mistress's mistress, I will be able to rule and rob uncontrolled.

The case is still worse, if the husband, instead of protecting, needs protection, if he is a small official waiting for promotion, a worker in want of a capitalist to push him. Here the female friend (who seems by M. Michelet's account to be the modern Diabolos of France, vice Satan superannuated) works upon the young woman, now by dwelling on her husband's inferiority to herself, now by insisting on his need of help from some one who should have strength and credit to lift him at last from the ground. A meeting is arranged somehow between the lady and the future protector, both duly instructed beforehand; the young woman seldom fails to justify what has been said of her by some slight act of coquetry, which she deems innocent, and in her husband's interest Audacity, a half-violence, often carries the thing.

...

.

"You say no. You believe that "such odious acts are only to be seen "in the lowest classes. You are quite "mistaken. It is very common... A "number of facts of this kind have

"come to my knowledge, and by most "certain channels.". . . . She cries, she will tell all, she does nothing... "My "dear, in your husband's name, I be"seech you, say nothing. He would "die of grief. Your children would be "ruined, your whole life upset. That man is so powerful to do harm. He "is very wicked when he hates, and is "provoked. But, one must admit it, "he is zealous also for those he loves, "he will do everything for your family, "for the future of your children."

And so the nauseous tale of corruption through family interest rolls on. The young woman is entrapped into writing a letter, which henceforth establishes her shame. Now, "She is "spoken to in another tone. Command "succeeds entreaty. She has a master, "-on such a day, at such an hour, "here or there, she is bid to come, and "she comes. The fear of scandal, I "know not what fascination, as of a "bird towards the snake, draw her "back in tears. She is all the prettier. "The promises are little remembered.

"When he has had enough, is she "free at least? Not a whit. The "female friend has the paper. . . . She "must go on, sold and resold, must "endure a new protector, who she is "told will do more, and often does yet "nothing. Fearful slavery, which lasts "while she is pretty and young, which "plunges her deeper and deeper, de"bases, perverts her."

Now, it would be too much to say that such tales are without analogy amongst ourselves. There were a few years ago, there may still be, factories in Lancashire and Cheshire, where the young master, or even more so the overlooker, views the female hands simply as a harem, of which he is the sultan. There are still agricultural parishes where no girl field-worker's virtue is safe against the squire's bailiff or gamekeeper. There are sweater's dens in London where living wages are utterly out of the reach of the poor tailoress, unless she be also the favourite for the time being. But in the classes to which M. Michelet assigns the tale, it could

not occur without filling journalists' pens with fire instead of ink, from John O'Groats to the Land's End. The leprosy of half-starved officialism has not tainted us so far as to endure such things. The moloch of competition has not yet in the trading world, even if it have in the working, claimed female virtue for its holocausts. Whilst England is free England, such enormities by the influential protector, capitalist, or official are, thank God, as unheard of, as in free France they some day will be.

But it is not only through its incidental revelations of these effects of the poison of a despotic centralization, both in corrupting the relations between man and man, and in taking away all fear on the one side, all confidence on the other, in the might of justice and public morality that this book is valuable. It is far more so as a testimony, all the more precious because unconscious, to that which M. Michelet in his nineteenth century enlightenment well-nigh completely ignores,-God's Bible, Christ's Gospel. M. Michelet exalts physiology, half proscribes the Bible. He forgets that there is a certain amount of physiological knowledge which is absolutely essential to the understanding of the Bible, and which no mother who really reverences God's word will withhold, in due time, from her daughter. But the moral truths which he evolves from physiological teaching are all, as far as I can see, anticipated in the Bible. If M. Michelet has satisfied himself by means of physiology that man is a monogamic animal, so much the better. But he who believes that from the mouth of Wisdom herself proceeded the words: "And they twain shall be one flesh," knows as much as he. If M. Michelet has learned from medical men that woman is not the impure creature that unnatural middle-age asceticism made of her, so much the better. he who has read in Genesis that she was made man's "help-meet,"-bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh,-can never be tempted, unless bewildered with lying traditions or puffed up with

But

false spiritual pride, to think otherwise of her. If he insist that by her constitution she has a constantly recurrent cause of disease within her, St. Paul's words, "the weaker vessel," command of stronger man all the deference and indulgence to which M. Michelet would persuade him. In short, mix together the few texts I have alluded to, with those other ones of Gen. ii. 25, and Gen. iii. 16, and dilute them with an infinite quantity of French fine writing, and you have the whole of "L'Amour," so far as it has any moral worth whatever. And he who chooses to meditate upon the "Song of Songs," both in itself, as the divine sanction of sensuous love as being the only adequate mirror of spiritual, and in its position in the sacred volume between Ecclesiasticus, the book of worldly experience, and Isaiah, the book of prophetic insight, as indicating the link which earthly love supplies between the two, will feel that 450 pages of French prose are but a poor exchange for its lyric lessons.

4

What is wanting indeed to M. Michelet's "true love"? Not self-contemplation; not the effort to be selfwrapped. But everything beloweverything above. The rock of a divine command on which man or woman can stand and say, I ought, and to the Tempter, Thou shalt not. The sense of an Almighty Love by whom each is upheld, on whose bosom each may sink, and feel that "underneath are the everlasting arms." The light of a Word made Flesh, who has suffered all our sufferings, borne all our sins. The help of a Spirit of Truth, who will guide us into all truth, though through never so much of doubt, and darkness, and despair. The beholding of the joy of a divine marriage, of the redeemed church with its Saviour, of which every smallest wedded joy of earth is a ray, towards which every truth of pure human love is an aspiration. The abiding and restful sense of subordination in harmonic unity, link after link in a divine chain; a subordination that lifts and does not lower, that joins and not

divides; gathering up successively all desire into a nobler object, all life into a mightier focus,-man the head of the woman,-Christ the head of man,God the head of Christ.

And for want of these, his whole purpose makes shipwreck. He promises woman her enfranchisement; but it is only to jail her within her own physical constitution, with her husband for turnkey. He lavishes his fancy on what may be called the lyrics of the flesh; but he does not trust that poor flesh for a moment; he is always watching it, spying it; his "medication" of heart or body presupposes and leaves it as frail and false as any Jesuit folio of casuistry. It has been well said, indeed, of the work by M. Emile Montégut that it is essentially a Romanist book, which had been unwritable and incomprehensible anywhere else than in a Roman Catholic country. The whole, in fact, of M. Michelet's work affords evidence of that "invincible ignorance"-to use a term of Romish theology-of Christ and of the Bible which Romanism leaves behind it in most souls, if it should come to depart from them. M. Michelet has no doubt read the Bible; he is familiar with religious works, both Protestant and Romish; he has himself written "Memoirs of Luther." And yet it may not be too much to say that he has never once seen Christ. This is even more evident in his last work, "La Femme," of which I have now to say a few words.

"La Femme" is in some parts a mere repetition, in many a dilution, of "L'Amour." It is on the whole less mawkish, but more wearisome. The writer's dissective tendencies rise in it to absolute rapture. A child's brain becomes in his pages "a broad and mighty camellia," "the flower of flowers," "the most touching beauty that nature has realized." But the work covers in some respects a new field. The hypothetical wife whom he exhibited in "L'Amour was after all, as I have said, some existing Frenchwoman brought up in Romanism, having, according to the writer, everything to