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unlearn from her free-minded husband, but at the same time most willing to do SO. This last trait, however, it would seem, was so far from reality as to spoil the picture. The second work then comes in to supply the true female ideal.

The great fact of the time, M. Michelet tells us, patent to all, is, that man lives apart from woman, and that more and more. Woman is left behind by man. Even a drawing-room divides into two -one of men, one of women. The attempt to make men and women speak together only creates a silence. They have no more ideas in common-no more a common language. In his introduction, the most valuable part of the volume, M. Michelet inquires rapidly into the social and economical causes of this alienation, quoting many interesting, some harrowing and hideous facts. Imagine this for instance, as to the venal tyranny of the theatrical press, in a country such as France, where political freedom is gagged:-An actress comes to a theatrical critic, to ask him why he is always writing her down. The answer is that she was somewhat favourably treated at first, and ought to have sent some solid mark of gratitude. -"But I am so poor; I gain next to nothing; I have a mother to main"tain.' 'What do I care? take a lover.' "But I am not pretty-I am so sadmen are only in love with cheerful "women.' 'No, you won't bamboozle

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me; you are pretty, young lady, it is only ill-will: you are proud, which "is bad. You must do as others—you "must have a lover.' M. Michelet seems to speak of this from personal experience. I wish he had added that he had flung the hound of a penny-aliner out of window.

Taking up, then, in the nineteenth century the work of Fénelon in the seventeenth, M. Michelet adopts for special subject the education of girls, with a view to filling the gap between the sexes. "Woman," ," he tells us, "is a religion." The education of a girl is therefore "to harmonize a religion," whilst that of a boy is "to organize a

force." In his views on the subject of female education, much will be found that is suggestive and beautiful. But the main point still remains-if woman is a religion, how is she to have one? "She must have a faith," we are told by the writer; logic would seem to require that that faith should be in her own self. What it is to be is really most difficult to discover. Towards ten or twelve, her father is to give her some select readings from original writers; narratives from Herodotus; the Retreat of the Ten Thousand; "some beautiful narrations from the Bible," the Odyssey, and "our modern Odysseys, our good travellers." Even before these, it would seem, she should have some "sound “and original readings . . . . some of "the truly ethereal hymns of the Vedas, "such and such prayers and laws of "Persia, so pure and so heroic, join"ing to these several of the touching "Biblical pastorals-Jacob, Ruth, To"bit," &c. The Bible itself must be kept aloof. Most of its books seem to M. Michelet to have been written after dark at night. God forbid that one should trouble too soon a young heart with the divorce of man from God, of the son from his father; with the dreadful problem of the origin of evil! . . . The book is not soft and enervating like the mystics of the middle ages; but it is too stormy, thick, restless. "Another motive again, which would "make me hesitate to read this too soon, "is the hatred of nature which the Jews

express everywhere. . . . This gives "to their books a negative, critical cha"racter; a character of gloomy austerity, "which is yet not always pure... Better read "in the Bible of light, the "Zend Avesta, the ancient and sacred 'complaint of the cow to man, to recall "to him the benefits which he owes "her...

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The subject is too grave for joking. But only imagine bringing up a girl upon cow-laments from the Zend Avesta, and keeping the Bible from her hands! Is it possible too for a man to read more completely into a book his own prejudices against it? Where, except in the in

human asceticism of the Romish middle ages, or in extreme Scotch Calvinism, do you find any trace of that "hatred of nature" which M. Michelet fathers upon the Bible? From the first page to the last, it is the book of nature almost as much as it is the book of man. Hatred of nature! No, the intensest sympathy which can yet consist with man's dignity, as God's vice-king over nature, made to have dominion over fish and fowl, cattle and creeping thing; over "all the earth," which he is not only commanded to "replenish," but to "subdue." He is to sympathise with nature under every aspect, from every point of view; as comprised with him in that creation, of whose absolute order and beauty it is written that "God saw everything that "He had made, and behold it was very "good;" as suffering, guiltless, through his fall, and cursed for his sake alone; as "groaning and travailing in pain together" with him for a common deliverance, as assured of a common perfection in the New Heaven and the New Earth. It is not enough that he is taught by Prophet, Psalmist, Apostleby none more assiduously than by the Saviour Himself to look on the face of nature as a mirror wherein are revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. He is called on to look on her as a fellow-servant; her obedience is repeatedly contrasted with his revolt. "The stork in the heavens knoweth "her appointed times; and the turtle, "and the crane, and the swallow observe "the time of their coming; but my "people know not the judgment of the Lord." "The ox knoweth his owner, "and the ass his master's crib, but "Israel doth not know, my people doth "not consider." Nay, she is more than a fellow-servant, she is a fellow-worshipper. Prophet nor Psalmist can satisfy their raptures of devotion, unless they call upon her to share them: "Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O "earth, and break forth into singing, "O mountains." "Let the heaven rejoice, and let the earth be glad ; let the "field be joyful, and all that therein is; "yea let all the trees of the wood rejoice No. 7.-VOL. II.

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"before the Lord." "Praise the Lord

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'upon earth, ye dragons and all deeps; "fire and hail, snow and vapours, stormy "wind fulfilling his word; mountains "and all hills, fruitful trees and all "cedars, beasts and all cattle, worms "and feathered fowls."... "Let every"thing that hath breath praise the "Lord." If this be hatred of nature, may every one of us enter more and more into the infinite fervent charity of such hatred! Is it not more likely to lift the soul of girl or boy than the sentimental self-consciousness of some ancient Parsee cow, mooing over her own ill-requited services? Will any worship of the bull Apis ever give such a sense of the real preciousness of animal life, as that last verse of the Book of Jonah: "Should I not spare "Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six-score thousand persons, "that cannot discern between their right "hand and their left hand; and also "much cattle?"

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I suspect the physiological period of M. Michelet's career will be the last. Read in the light of his two latest works, I think his earlier ones-the "Introduction to Universal History" for instance -bear testimony that the whole tendency of his mind has always been towards the spiritualistic materialism, as I prefer to call it the "mystic sensualism," as it has been called by a French Protestant critic-of which "L'Amour," and "La Femme," are the direct exponents. In "La Femme" we cannot fail to perceive a senile garrulity, which marks that the writer has fully passed the climax of his genius, a climax which may perhaps be fixed at "The Bird." I have generally felt compelled, in translating from him, to abridge also. I doubt if he has much henceforth to tell us that is new. Indeed, the moral side of "La Femme," is already to be found fully indicated in the much earlier "Priests, Women, and Families."

I have called the doctrine of these works "materialism." I know that none would protest more strongly against the application to them of such a term than the writer. "I have

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spent all my life," he tells us, "in claiming the rights of the soul against the nauseous materialism of my time." Again and again he uses the term as one of the utmost reproach. And yet the books are essentially materialistic. The physical organization of woman is made practically the standard of her capacity for perceiving right and wrong. Love is made, in fact, its own end, although announced as a means of moral enfranchisement. Nothing is shown to the woman above the man, unless it be, and in such proportions as he chooses to show it her, some misty idea of the great harmony, "in which we should wish to die as much as to live, in the just and regular law of the All." Through this "all" may indeed hover the name of God, but more as a ghost deprived of its last resting-place, than as He that Is. The writer may indeed tell us that he "cannot do without God;" that "the "momentary eclipse of the high central "idea darkens this marvellous modern "world of sciences and discoveries;" that the unity of the world is love; that woman feels the infinite "in the loving

cause and the father of nature, who "procreates her from the good to the "better." Yet what is this beyond mere Pantheistic Hindooism, drenched in verbiage? Heine, we are told, called M. Michelet a Hindoo. One feels tempted to say, Let him be so in good earnest. God for god, I prefer Vishnu to the thin shadow of him which flits through M. Michelet's pages. Any one of his avatars would be preferable for me to that repulsive Egyptian myth of Isis, (a mother by her twin brother ere her birth), which M. Michelet tells us has never been exceeded, which he offers as food to the "common faith" of husband and wife. Again, he may give us a chapter, and a very touching one too, on "love beyond the grave," in which he exhibits to us the departed husband discoursing on immortality to his widow. But after all, what assurance have we that such a colloquy is any more, was even meant to be any more, than a piece of sentimental ventriloquism? The pledge of immortality is not one that

can be given by mortal to mortal. "Because I live, ye shall live also." When He who is the Source and Lord of life tells us so, we may believe and hope. "Because I died, thou shalt live." Can even the madness of unsatisfied love make more than a temporary plaything of such an assurance ?

But I have called the doctrine of these works, spiritualistic materialism. I do not care for the strangeness of the expression, if by means of it I can only waken up those who are content to rest upon the traditions, opinions, prejudices of past days, to some sense of the strange and new things with which they have now to deal. If they would be prepared to combat whatever is evil and deadly in the doctrine of which I am speaking, let them utterly put out of their minds all conceptions of a materialist as of a man wallowing in sensual indulgencies, denying the very idea of right; or even as of a hard-minded logician, treating as impossible all that he cannot see, scoffing at faith as at a child grasping for the moon, or for his own image in the mirror. Michelet, indeed, proclaims himself a spiritualist; he "cannot do without God;" faith in a spirit of love, if scarcely of truth, breathes throughout his pages. What I have ventured to term his materialism comes forth in the name and on behalf of morality; for the restoration of the purity of marriage, of the harmony of the family. As the frank and eloquent witness against the corruptions of that purity and harmony in our social state, he deserves all our sympathy and respect. We may not, thank God, have reached yet in free Protestant England that depth of cold cynicism which he indignantly exhibits to us, when he repeats, as an ear-witness, the advice of a husband and a father living in the country, to a young man of the neighbourhood: "If you are to remain here, "you must marry, but if you live in "Paris, it is not worth while. It is too

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slopes, to the same gulf. We have nothing, God knows, to boast of. Penitentiaries, I fear, receive generally but the heaviest dregs of the seething caldron of female vice. Midnight tea-meetings will, I fear, do little more than skim off a little froth from its surface. Neither the one nor the other either lessen the demand, or even attack the supply in its sources,—in those ill-paid labours which the cursed thirst for cheapness tends to multiply, in that money-worship which makes wealth as such honourable, and poverty the worst of shames,-in those plutonomic doctrines which are erected. into a faith for states or for individuals, and which tend to supplant everywhere duty by interest, the living force of "Thou shalt" by the restraining doubt "Will it pay?" Michelet has at least the merit of attempting a radical cure for the evil. He addresses man rather than woman; and he is right. seeks to conquer lust by love; and he is right. His folly lies in treating earthly love as if it could be its own centre, its own self-renewing source.

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That folly has been pointed out ere this in France itself by manlier and nobler pens than his own. M. Emile Montégut, in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," for December 1858, has complained of the absence in M. Michelet's ideal marriage of the true freedom of the soul, "of those great moral and religious laws" which formerly presided over it; has told him that love, as he represents it, wounds the dignity of nian, enervates, effeminates him; that the home he paints is little more than the "retreat of two selfish voluptuaries." These are hard words, harder than I have ventured to use. And yet the French critic concludes, as I would fain do myself, with expressing the hope that M. Michelet's writings may not be without their use,-that they may have some effect for good on many opaque and dried-up brain," on many 'a dry vain heart," on many poor crea

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tures prone to brutality, to sensual ferocity, to barbarous selfishness. Indeed already and long ere this, as M. Michelet tells us himself, the witness which he has borne for moral purity has not been without its fruits. Whilst he was yet professor, a young man one morning burst into his room, to give him the news that the masters of certain cafés, of certain other well-known houses, complained of his teaching. Their establishments were losing by it. Young men were imbibing a mania of serious conversation, forgetting their habits. The students' balls ran risk of closing. All who gained by the amusements of the schools deemed themselves threatened by a moral revolution. - How many of our preachers could say as much?

For us, Englishmen,-bound as we are in charity to indulgence towards M. Michelet by the almost invariable mistakes which he makes whenever he speaks of us or of our country,—we need not fear, I take it, even the worst influences of his teaching; it is too essentially French to affect us. We may fear however, and we ought to fear, that refined materialism of which it is one of the symptoms, which confounds worship with a certain religiosity, replaces faith by sentiments, and affects to see God in nature everywhere, but in nature only. Crown him, girdle him, smother him with flowers, the Nature-god is at bottom but a bundle of cruel forces and lawless lusts,-the Krishna of the sixteen thousand gopis is the same, through whose flaming jaws Arjuna saw generation after generation of created beings rush headlong to destruction. But against such Pantheism, overt or latent, in the gristle or in the bone, there is no better preservation than the Pantheism, if I may use the term, of Christianity. None will ever be tempted to worship nature less, than he who has learnt to see her divine in God.

TOM BROWN AT OXFORD.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL-DAYS."

CHAPTER XVII.

NEW GROUND.

My readers have now been steadily at Oxford for six months without moving. Most people find such a spell of the place without a change quite as much as they care to take; moreover it may do our hero good to let him alone for a number, that he may have time to look steadily into the pit which he has been

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near falling into, which is still yawning awkwardly in his path; moreover, the exigencies of a story-teller must lead him away from home now and then. Like the rest of us, his family must have change of air, or he has to go off to see a friend properly married, or a connexion buried; to wear white or black gloves with or for some one, carrying such sympathy as he can with him, that so he may come back from every journey, however short, with a wider horizon. Yes; to come back home after every stage of life's journeying with a wider horizon, more in sympathy with men and nature, knowing ever more of the righteous and eternal laws which govern them, and of the righteous and loving will which is above all, and around all, and beneath all, this must be the end and aim of all of us, or we shall be wandering about blindfold, and spending time and labour and journey-money on that which profiteth nothing. So now I must ask my readers to forget the old buildings and quadrangles of the fairest of England's cities, the caps and the gowns, the reading and rowing, for a short space, and take a flight with me to other scenes and pastures new.

The nights are pleasant in May, short and pleasant for travel. We will leave the ancient city asleep, and do our flight in the night to save time. Trust yourselves then to the story-teller's aerial machine. It is but a rough affair, I own,

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rough and humble, unfitted for high or great flights, with no gilded panels, or dainty cushions, or C-springs-not that we shall care about springs, by the way, until we alight on terra firma again— still, there is much to be learned in a third-class carriage if we will only not look for the cushions and fine panels, and forty miles an hour travelling in it, and will not be shocked at our fellowpassengers for being weak in their h's and smelling of fustian. Mount in it, then, you who will after this warning; the fares are holiday fares, the tickets return tickets. Take with you nothing but the poet's luggage,

"A smile for Hope, a tear for Pain,
A breath to swell the voice of
Prayer,"

and may you have a pleasant journey, for it is time that the stoker should be looking to his going gear!

So now we rise slowly in the moonlight from St. Ambrose's quadrangle, and, when we are clear of the clocktower, steer away southwards, over Oxford city and all its sleeping wisdom and folly, over street and past spire, over Christ Church and the canons' houses, and the fountain in Tom quad; over St. Aldate's and the river, along which the moonbeams lie in a pathway of twinkling silver, over the railway shedsno, there was then no railway, but only the quiet fields and footpaths of Hincksey hamlet. Well, no matter; at any rate, the hills beyond and Bagley Wood were there then as now: and over hills and wood we rise, catching the purr of the night-jar, the trill of the nightingale, and the first crow of the earliest cock pheasant, as he stretches his jewelled wings, conscious of his strength and his beauty, heedless of the fellows of St. John's, who slumber within sight of his perch, on whose hospitable board he shall one day lie prone on his back, with

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