BOOKS.
QUINET'S LAST WORK.* THE critic has never a more difficult and delicate task before him, than when he has to deal with the work of a great writer, left un- finished at death. Is he to look at it as it is, or as it might have been ?—as a mere fragment, or as part of a whole ? The attempt to judge it from the latter point of view is surely gross presumption, not to say impertinence. For it implies a creative power equal to that of the author himself. If the critic can fore- cast what the book would have been, it is as good as saying that he might have written it. But if be falls back on the seemingly more modest task of judging of it as a fragment only, he runs the risk of doing the greatest injustice to the writer. He never meant it to be so treated ; he only viewed it in relation to the ideal whole. You may be distorting his very purpose, by not looking beyond these mere beginnings of his.work. You must look beyond them, to understand those beginnings themselves. The foundations of a building have no meaning, until our mind can shape to itself in some way the superstructure that is to be reared upon them. You cannot tell whether this marble foot or arm be monstrous or ex- quisite until you have imagined to yourself the entire figure of which it was to form a part ; it never can be a foot or arm, and nothing more ; it must be the foot or arm of some definite entity, whether a Venus, an Apollo, a Hercules,—and again, whether life-sized, or under life-size, or colossal. Shrink from the task as you may, so long as you are dealing with a fragment, you must criticise with something more than with the intellect ; you must imagine, you must in a measure create.
But what additional difficulty in the attempt, when that which we have before us is not—like the unearthed limb of a broken statue —a portion of a finished, but of an uncompleted whole! The laws of symmetry come to our aid in the one case. The leg or arm which we have before us gives at least the proportion of the whole body ; perhaps the strain of a muscle may to some extent indicate its attitude. We do not require to be a Phidias to de- termine whether the fragment belonged to god or goddess,
• Irk et Mart At Girds Gra. Paris: Dentu. 1818.
whether it represents youth or old age, what would have been the size of the statue if entire. We may recompose without having
wholly to recreate. Those subtleties of perfection which would result from the relation of each part to the whole, if we knew the precise attitude, meaning, expression of the figure, may, no doubt, escape us, but still we can pronounce safely that the fragment is shapely or misshapen, that it belonged to a masterpiece or was the work of a bungler. In the other case we have, in some way or other, to take account of the whole world of possibilities involved in the laws of growth, as mysterious in the processes of the intellect as in those of the body. The sculptor's work may be somewhat far advanced, whilst it is yet open to him to fine down what seems to be a Juno into a Venus, what might be a Hercules into an Apollo. In attempting to judge of a literary work by an unfinished fragment, we are like a physiologist who from an infant's limb should try to reconstruct the grown man or woman that should have been. How can we tell what would have been added, what suppressed, what strength of outline might have been chiselled here, what delicate roundings there worked out ? Surely the task is a hopeless one.
And yet, again, the task attracts. There is always a peculiar in- terest attaching to the last interrupted words of a great writer, the last stirrings of a noble intellect. You cannot put them aside. They have a worth of their own, just because they are the last. There is in them a fascination which no completed work can possess. Even if they should seem poor and feeble in themselves, they have upon them the spell of the unknown Beyond. They leave us stooping over the brink of Infinitude. We are fain to ask of the closed lips,—what follows? But what followed for them was eternity.
In the present instance, indeed, the devout care of one whose privilege it was to share all her husband's thoughts and aspira- tions—the most enthusiastic of disciples, the tenderest of wives— has done all that could be done to give completeness to the un- finished. Madame Quinet is able to tell us of the readings, of the conversations out of which the book has sprung, of much that the writer intended to say. She has endeavoured to eke out what he has left unsaid by extracts from all his previous works on the subject. What is done, alas ! is not much ; some sixty pages, written on the 19th and 20th March, 1875, closing at the first words of a paragraph,—" Apres ce premier pas," words that might almost serve as the motto to the fragment itself, a "first step," according to the writer's view, although his last for all the world besides. "how the Greek Genius was Formed," " lEschy- lus," "The Greek Drama," " Herodotus," "Heroism and Wisdom," "Unity of the Race," "Oracles," "Heroism in Life and in Art," " Pindar," "Alcibiades," "Demosthenes," " Plu- tarch,"—such are the headings of the twelve chapters. To these Madame Quinet has added, in her 160 pages of notes, chapters (amongst others) on Sophocles, Euripides, Phidias, Pericles, Theocritus, Epictetus, and Plato. Others were meditated by her husband, she tells us, on The New Art," "Melody," "Harmony," and "Symphony." Her own notes, it should be said at once, to whatever extent they may be echoes of another's voice, show, never- theless, a serious study of Greek antiquity. The clue to the whole is given in the words prefixed :— " Where take refuge, in order not to see what I see, not to hear what I hear ?—I will take refuge on an inaccessible rock, the Greek world. I will show its formation in the Classical age."
Substantially, then, the work was intended as a protest against the France of early 1875, the France of the anti-Republican reaction of Messrs. de Broglie and Co. To understand its spirit, behind the Greece it speaks of, we must see France,—France defeated and mutilated by Germany, overshadowed by the horror and shame of the still recent Commune, paralysed by a Government openly and almost disdainfully hostile to the very institutions to which it owed its birth. To this France, struggling and well-nigh lost in the darkness of her adversity, Quinet opposes the greatness of ancient Greece, illumined till the days of Demosthenes by the splendour of its triumphs over Persia :—
" How have men been able till now to separate from the Medic wars that Greek art which came out from them, which crowns them? I see letters, arts, marbles burst into bloom beneath the breath of those victories. Hellas, which was nigh to perishing, has triumphed over the Barbarian. What writer, what poet, what sculptor but will respond to such a moment ? This explains the inexhaustible fecundity of those early days. What mountain-summit will not adorn itself with a temple, in order to carry up to Heaven the gratitude of the Hellenic land? And what can be the character of such works ? That which flows from the sense of victory won. That is to say, the peace, the stability, the serenity of the Immortals. Greece felt herself invulnerable; she pro- claims it in all her works. Greek art is thus born of victory. Its greatest characteristic lies there."
It is this sense of triumph which Quinet traces, with all his usual poetry of diction, through .1schylus and the Greek Drama, through Herodotus, Pindar, and as far as Demosthenes. He finds the "calm smile of Leonidas or Aristides on the battle- morn" in Plato's Dialogues, as well as in the figures of the Par- thenon. And although Pindar never names Salamis or Plates, Quinet acutely suggests that this was because Thebes, his own city, had made common cause with the barbarians,—he feels in every one of the Odes the enthusiasm of those heroic days. Demosthenes is "full still of the Medic wars." But that is all. "In Plutarch the sense of the Greek race has disappeared ; it is no longer the history of a nation ; you have only before you a few detached individuals." Plutarch treats the Romans as saviours of Greek liberty, and the saviour of saviours is Nero, who has competed in the Isthmian games for the prize of song.
It is needless to say that the too scant pages are full of striking observations and brilliant thoughts. Nothing, for instance, can be better than what Quinet says of the development and ripening of the genius of Herodotus from book to book,—in his beginnings, something of the chronicler ; at the end, almost a Thucydides,— at first purely Ionic, almost Attic at last. Madame Quinet, indeed, tells us that at times, when his patriotic apprehensions became too vivid, Edgar Quinet would smile and exclaim, "Let us talk of Herodotus !" that certain speeches in Herodotus " stirred him so ddeply, that he once exclaimed, with stifled voice, covering his face with his hands, No, I cannot go on to the end !' " It seems indeed clear, from the last words of the eighth chapter, that between it and the next, on Pindar, there was meant to be interposed some kind of sketch, drawn from Herodotus, of the history of Greek heroism, and in all probability Herodotus would have been the central figure of the book when completed.
In point of beauty of style and vivacity of thought, Quinces last work is undoubtedly equal to anything he ever wrote. It has all the immortal youthfulness of real genius. But one may go further, and say that it has the very faults of youth upon it. Its conception is not that of ripened wisdom, but of immature haste, both intellectual and moral. How, for instance, could any one ever truly sketch the "life and death of Greek genius,"and say nothing of Homer, except that for Homer, Hellas was only a corner of Thessaly ? Without Homer, Greek literature, Greek art would be the most hopeless of riddles, in despite of ever so many Marathons and Platceas,—if, indeed, without Homer even Marathon and Platwa could have been. Again, is it not almost cruel to tell a defeated people,—Be victorious? Victory is not to be had for the asking. Victory of itself confers no nobility. Is Ger- many any the nobler for her victory ? Do we see in her any of that blossoming-forth of art or literature which, according to Quinet, should be its fruits ? Did not all her greatest intellectual and artistic glories belong to the days of comparative, or even absolute, darkness and distress ? Where are her Goethes, Schillers, Kants, Herders, her Bache, Gliicks, Mozarts, Beethovens of to- day? Was the Divine Commedia the fruit of victory, or Paradise Lost ? While Poland was yet a State, did it produce a Mickiewicz ? Did Victor Hugo lose his genius in exile ? Did Quinet himself ?
It is difficult to believe that if Quinet had survived to see the splendid political revival of his country, he would not at least have deeply modified his work. There are passages in it which indi- cate already that before completing it he would have reached to the deeper truth that it is freedom, not victory, which gives the secret of Greek art and literature. For if the "sense of victory" gives "the peace, the stability, the serenity of the Immortals," it would be in the literature, the art of Rome, mistress of the world during so many centuries, that we should have to look for the most transcendent display of these qualities. And yet they are con- spicuously absent. Virgil himself, who has most of them, has his own vibrant chord of nameless sorrow, wholly foreign to Classical Greece. Suet lacrymm rerum. The Pax Romana of the triumphant Empire gives birth, as its most characteristic expression, to those two most terrible of all satirists in verse and prose, Juvenal and Tacitus. Why, but because the essential condition of all inward peace and serenity is not victory, but freedom ; because Rome was victorious, but enslaved ?
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