The Catholic World Volume Iii Part 67

The reading has stopped and their talk turns upon private matters, something about Caroline, and hopes and fears for the future. We will leave them to their conversation, and pa.s.s out through yonder door, pausing for an instant to admire that picture of the Madonna and child, presented to the family by the Queen, and to look through the gla.s.s doors and arched window at the terrace, all green and blossoming with roses and acacias.

Here we are in an M. de Guerin's room, with its table and chairs loaded with books and with dust! That prie-Dieu was embroidered by Mme. de Guerin and whose pensive look face looks out from the pictures, hanging between the fireplace and the bed. There is the cross presented by Christine Rognier, and the holy water vase, and the picture of Calvary before which Eugenie used to kneel and pour out her childish woes. One day she prayed that some spots might disappear from her frock, and a disappeared--and again she begged that her doll might have a soul, but that never came to pa.s.s. No doubt it was in this great state bed that Madame de Guerin died at midnight on the second of April, 1819. Eugenie had fallen asleep at her mother's feet, and as the spirit pa.s.sed away from the long suffering body, M. de Guerin waked the little girl. "My G.o.d! I hear the priest, I see the lighted candles and a pale face the in tears," she wrote sixteen years afterwards. Poor little soul! She awoke to the double responsibility of child and parent, for the little eight-year-old Maurice was her mother's legacy to her.

Now a dark spiral staircase in the turret leads to a large hall on the first story, and then winds on with several landing-places to the upper part of the house where the servants sleep.

This hall is the grand reception-room for guests of distinction, and has more and air of grandeur then the rest of the chateau. This ornamented ceiling and deep wainscoting of carved wood, these paintings set in the panels, and that huge chimney-piece supported on stone caryatides, call up to our fancy the days when stately dames and gentle couriers visited Le Cayla for the hunting season. But there is a golden renown in store for this shattered, time-worn house, more precious than that shed upon it by any Guerin of the seventeenth century.

Suites of small rooms lead from the hall--here is the room that Eugenie shares with her younger sister Marie, and near by is the _chambrette_ where Maurice sleeps when he is at home. In his absence it is her nest where she reads, writes, prays, or leans on the window-sill to listen to the brook rippling below the terrace, two doves, and nightingales and all the lovely {413} out-door sounds; or to look over the corn-fields, groves, chestnut trees, and vineyards in the valley, far away to the mountains where the friend, Louis de Bayne, lives in a white chateau with a linden tree walk, in a country of ravines and waterfalls;--but we have indulged long enough in this summer dream of Le Cayla, and must turn to a picture full of sober tints and shadows.

LA CHENAIE

In Brittany, within a few hours drive from Rennes, was the old family place of the Lamennais, where about the year 1830 Hughes Filicite de Lamennais drew about him several of the most promising intellects of France, [Footnote 64] with the view of establishing a new religious order, that should meet all the demands of that most grasping of centuries, the nineteenth. Montalembert, Gerbert, Sainte-Beuve, Lacordaire, Rohrbacher, Combalot, and many others of more or less distinction, were inmates or frequent visitors in the old white house with its peaked French roof, surrounded on every side by thick woods that were full of beauty and song in summer, but in winter pressed about it in dusky--brown monotony, while overhead on the grey, heavy Breton sky.

[Footnote 64: The precise period at which La Chenaie became the resort of the celebrated men we have been unable to ascertain.

The Lamennais were a commercial family in Bordeaux, enn.o.bled during the reign of Louis XVI. L'Abbe de Lamennais, the second son, refusing to become a merchant, retired to La Chenaie, and prepared himself for the priesthood.]

Here Lamennais pa.s.sed through many of the struggles of his giant nature, slow in its action, but never pausing until it had reached the extreme result of any course of thought or feeling. Here, at fifteen years of age, he took refuge with his brother, Jean de Lamennais, to think out the perplexities that clouded his faith so persistently as to prevent him from receiving his first communion until he was twenty-two years old; and hither he came to labor over the task he had proposed to himself, of procuring the banishment of tyranny and suffering from the earth.

At the time Maurice de Guerin [Footnote 65] joined the little circle at La Chenaie, Lamennais had reached the turning point in his career.

After preaching in his journal, with the a.s.surance of a prophet, the public union of Catholicity and democracy, he had suffered the mortification of finding himself obliged to suspend the publication of _L'Avenir_. A visit to Rome, where he was treated with the greatest personal consideration, convinced him that there was no prospect of support from the Holy See, and he returned home oppressed with disappointment, and though apparently submissive to the decisions of his superiors, already resolving in his mind, perhaps unconsciously, plans to crush the power that had crushed him. Those around him feared that he would die of grief. One day he said to his favorite pupil, Elie de Kertauguy, when they were sitting together under one of the Scotch pines behind the chapel, in the great spreading garden: "There is the place where I wish to rest," marking out on the gra.s.s the form of a grave with his stick: "But no tombstone over me--only a mound of earth. Oh! I shall be well off there."

[Footnote 65: Vide M. Sainte-Beuve's "Notice sur Maurice de Guerin."]

"If," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "he had died then, or in the following months, if his heart had snapped in it's hidden struggle, what a fair, unblemished memory he would have left, what fame as a faithful believer (fidele) a hero--almost a martyr! What a mysterious subject of meditation and revery to those who love to contemplate great destinies thwarted!" And yet even then Lamennais' sufferings must have proceeded more from wounded pride than from disappointed philanthropy, for one can hardly imagine a sterner course of tyranny then that of forcing dogmatically upon Catholic nations a theory of political freedom that would have thrown half the civilized world into a state of revolution.

{414}

A striking point in M. Sainte-Beuve's masterly a.n.a.lysis of the character of his former friend is the strange contrast offered by the double nature of Lamennais, who always leaned completely to one side or the other, without any gradation, sometimes being possessed by what Buffon calls, in speaking of beasts of prey, "a soul wrath;" and again filled with a sweetness and tenderness that drew little children to him, a truly fascinating mood; and from one humor to the other he would pa.s.s in an instant.

To La Chenaie and to the influence of this wonderful being, this compound a pathetic gentleness and combative obstinacy, of magnetism and repulsion, Guerin came one afternoon early in the December of 1832. M. Feli, as Lamennais was called in his household, where ceremony was laid aside, and the most charming relations existed between old and young, received him very cordially in his little private parlor, which was furnished with one chair and a chest of drawers. The master had a way of letting the person he was conversing with say everything that he had to say upon a subject without interruption (and uncomfortable method, by the way, of convincing one of the paucity of one's ideas), and then he would take up the matter himself, and speak "gravely, profoundly, luminously." But on this occasion he gave himself up freely to a chat upon all sorts of subjects calculated to draw out the general intelligence of his new pupil--the weather in Languedoc, Maurice's traveling companions, his age, the high tides that Saint Malo, Calderon, oyster fishing, Catholic poetry, Victor Hugo, the most remarkable fishes on the coast of Brittany--all the while hurrying to and fro in the little room, presenting a singular appearance with his small, slender figure clad in grey from head to foot, his oblong head, pale complexion, grey eyes, long nose, and brow furrowed with wrinkles.

The life at La Chenaie suited Guerin's taste admirably, excepting perhaps the practice of rising at five o'clock, against which every well-regulated mind must rebel. One of his great enjoyments was the daily ma.s.s in the quiet little chapel below the terrace in the garden.

"At breakfast," he wrote to Eugenie, "we have b.u.t.ter, and bread which we toast to make it more appetizing (toast was rather a luxury in those days on the continent), b.u.t.ter plays an important part in the meals. Dinner _tres confortable_, with coffee and _liqueurs_ when we have company, is seasoned with a rolling fire of wit, generally coming from M. Feli--whose _mots_ are charming--vivid, piercing, sparkling, and innumerable. His genius escapes in this way when he is not at work, and from sublime he becomes fascinating."

In studies, Maurice was thrown into modern languages, Catholic philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Each pupil had a room to himself, but they all studied in a common room sitting round a good fire. Their recreations consisted in skating on a pond close by the house, or taking walks in the woods, staff in hand, M. Feli marching on ahead wearing a battered old straw hat such as great men love to shelter their ill.u.s.trious heads with. They had supper at eight o'clock and then adjourned to the pleasant, quaint old parlor, where chess and backgammon greeted the master's longing eyes, smoothing his brow and putting him in genial mood. Then he would throw himself on the immense sofa that stood under his grandmother's portrait, and become absorbed into the threadbare crimson velvet, except the little head ever rolling restlessly from side to side with eyes gleaming like fire-flies.

"And then he would talk, Ye G.o.ds! how he would talk!"--

What treasures of wit, humor, anecdote, a.n.a.lysis, and broad generalization poured from that horn of plenty, {415} his mind stored with the prints of nearly half a century of philosophic research and observation of men and things! His voice varied with his words from grave to gay, and now and then came long peals of shrill laughter, more derisive perhaps than mirthful. "That is _our man!_" said Maurice proudly, after describing such an evening; that evening perhaps when his own attractions eclipsed the master's brilliancy in the estimation of one who saw him for the first time--M. de Marzan, a former pupil of Lamennais, who revisited La Chenaie on the 18th of December, 1832.

M. Feli was in one of his most delightful moods, recounting the experiences of his late Italian journey, and drawing out in his genial way the keen observations of the young men about him--of all excepting poor Maurice, who stood silent among the hopeful, eager talkers, painfully conscious of himself and distrustful of others, we must confess, with all affectionate sympathy for our hero. But in his reserved mien, in his expressive southern eyes and intellectual face, there was a magnetism that won completely M. de Marzan's attention from the delights of conversation, and as soon as the evening ended, he obtained an introduction through Elie de Kertauguy, a handsome, gifted youth from Lower Brittany, pa.s.sionately devoted to Lamennais, and compa.s.sionately attentive to Guerin, regarding him, as did most of the inmates of La Chenaie, as a refined but very inefficient member of their circle.

Not so Marzan, who in twenty-four hours had thawed Maurice's reserve, won his confidence, seen his journal, heard the circ.u.mstances of his unrequited love for Mlle. de Bayne, and laid the foundation of a friendship that lasted unbroken to the day of Guerin's death. What days, and nights too, of rapture these two young poets used to spend together, guided by their older and more experienced friend, Hippolyte de La Morvonnais (a frequent visitor at La Chenaie), who had been to Grasmere to visit Wordsworth, and come home imbued with veneration for "Les Lakistes". (The Lake Poets). There came to be a mania among the three friends for describing in homely language the simplest domestic details, which they considered it a triumph in art to be able to give in a rhythm so dubious that none but the initiated could tell whether it was meant for prose or verse.

Even at this early period, Guerin gave evidence of the peculiar strength and weakness of his style, the vagueness and looseness of his verse, the faultless harmony of his prose, which is as pure as air, free from the least touch of provincialism or mannerism; and yet, in the simple fervor of its revelations of the secrets that nature poured into his attentive ear, we are reminded of the sweet pipings of the Ettrick Shepherd, as dear old Christopher North interprets them to us.

Through him we see and hear trees wave and waters flow, birds sing and winds sigh in the woods, and without being disturbed by moral inferences and philosophical conclusions. And surely, when beauty comes to us so pure and fresh and untarnished, she may be left to teach her own lessons, which come to us so softly too from her lips.

The months that Maurice spent at La Chenaie were not especially fruitful to him, except in the sad experiences that tended to develop his moral strength. But for Morvonnais and Marzan, he would have remained quite unappreciated, for Lamennais, who gave the tone to the household, was too much "absorbed in his apocalyptic social visions"

[Footnote 66] to be conscious of the jewel that glittered before his eyes. Lamennais was a logician, a philosopher, a pa.s.sionate and fanatical worker. Guerin was a man of {416} exquisite artistic perceptions, but dreamy, undecided, deficient in vigor. Odin and Apollo,--sledge-hammer and chisel,--thunderbolt and sunbeam, are not more unlike in use and significance. M. Feli offered nothing but pitying tenderness, which Maurice accepted in dumb veneration. No wonder that, with the life at La Chenaie, all intimate intercourse between them ceased.

[Footnote 66: Sainte-Beuve.]

But it is a matter for surprise that, with all his powers of fascination, Lamennais inflicted (so far as we can learn the circ.u.mstances of the case) no permanent injury upon the faith of any one of his companions at La Chenaie. Lacordaire, Gerbet, Montalembert, and Bohrbacher became renowned champions of the church. Combalot, who had adored Lamennais, burst forth into a storm of invectives against him (as is the wont of disappointed idolaters), and then exclaimed, "Alas! I have wounded that heart into which I could have poured torrents of love!" Morvonnais and Marzan were ardent believers; Elie de Kertauguy and Guerin died Catholics. In short, Lamennais had devoted the prime of life to the church, and in those years had uttered words of wisdom never to be unsaid or forgotten. In spite of himself he must always be an eloquent advocate of the faith he deserted, a powerful enemy of the cause he espoused.

The time was already drawing near when the asylum should be closed to Maurice where he had found, in spite of disappointment and frequent depression, a happy, congenial home. On Easter Sunday, Lamennais celebrated his last ma.s.s and gave communion to all the little circle.

"Who would have said" (we quote from Sainte-Beuve) "to those who cl.u.s.tered round the master, that he who had just given them communion, would never administer it again to anyone; that he would refuse it forevermore; and that he would soon adopt for his too true device an _oak shattered_ by the storm, with the proud motto: _I break but bend not!_ A t.i.tan's device, _a la Capanee!_"

Early in the autumn of 1833, the Bishop of Rennes ordered the dissolution of Lamennais' religious community, and the pupils were removed to Ploermel, where they continued their studies under the supervision of M. Jean de Lamennais. M. Feli disbanded his little army with the dignity of a defeated general, and then threw himself single-handed again into the fight. He changed his patrician name to F. Lamennais, and demanded of democracy (says one of his biographers), as he had demanded of the church, a wand-stroke that should free the world at once from suffering and oppression. His success may be judged by the political history of France in the last sixteen years. In religion he adopted "_Christianisme legislate,_" [Footnote 67]

whatever that may be. "If," said he, "men feel so irresistibly impelled to unite themselves to G.o.d that they return to Christianity, let no one suppose that it can be to that Christianity which presents itself under the name of Catholicism."

[Footnote 67: Lamartine.]

In the revolution of '48 he thought he saw the birth of liberty; in the "Coup d'Etat" he received its death-blow in his own person.

Baffled on every side, he betook himself to literature, and translated the "Divina Commedia;" then "feeling within him no life-sustaining thought," he died in his seventy-third year, after an illness of a few weeks, leaving these words in his will: "I will be buried among the poor, and like the poor. I will have nothing over my grave, not even a stone; nor will I have my body carried into any church." They laid him in Pere la Chaise, and no word of blessing was uttered over his grave.

Poor Lamennais! What magnificent possibilities were shattered in his fall!

And Maurice, what were his emotions when the door of La Chenaie dosed behind him?--the "little paradise" he called it, but then, poor soul, {417} anything that had escaped him for ever seemed to have been paradise. He suffered all that must be endured by those who have mistaken personal influence for a divine attraction. The novitate on which he had entered at La Chenaie with a certain reluctance, galled him beyond endurance at Ploermel. "I would rather run the chance of a life of adventure than be garrotted by a rule," he said, and so he went out into the world again, feeling like a thing let loose in the universe, and by the blessing of Providence was received into the home of his unfailing friend, Hippolyte de la Morvonnais, who lived most delightfully on the coast of Brittany, at a place called Le Val de l'Arquenon.

Two months of simple country life, and of intercourse with Morvonnais, and with his wife, who exercised over Maurice the n.o.blest and sweetest influence, gave him renewed strength to battle with life again. In the following extract from his journal, describing the last walk at Le Val, we see with what tenacity he clung to the past, and with what sadness he encountered the future: "Ten o'clock in the evening. Last walk, last visit to the sea, to the cliffs, to the whole grand scenery that has enchanted me for two months. Winter is smiling upon us with all the grace of spring, and giving us days that make birds sing and leaves burst forth on the rose-bushes in the garden, on the eglantine in the woods, on the honeysuckle climbing over rock and wall. About two o'clock we took the path that winds so gracefully through flowering broom and coa.r.s.e cliff gra.s.s, skirting along wheat-fields, bending toward ravines, twisting in and out between hedge-rows, and at last boldly ascending the loftiest rocks. The object of our walk was a promontory that commands the Bay of Quatre-Vaux. A hundred feet below us shone the sea, breaking against the rocks with sounds that pa.s.sed through our souls as they mounted to heaven. Toward the horizon the fishing-boats unfurled against the azure sky their dazzling sails, and as our eyes turned from this little fleet to the more numerous one that sailed singing nearer to us, an innumerable crowd of sea-birds fishing gaily, and gladdening our eyes with the sight of their bright plumage and graceful movements over the water--the birds, the sails, the lovely day and universal peace gave to the sea a festal beauty that filled my soul with glad enthusiasm in spite of the sad thoughts I had brought with me to our promontory; and then I looked with all my soul at headlands, rocks, and islands, trying to imprint them on my memory and carry them away with me. Coming home I trod religiously, and with regret at every step, the path that had so often led me to such beautiful thoughts, in such sweet company. The path is so charming when it reaches the coppice, and pa.s.ses on among high hazel trees, and a thick, bushy hedge of boxwood! Then the joy that nature had bestowed upon me died away, and the melancholy of parting took possession of me. Tomorrow will make of sea, and woods, and coast, and all the charms I have enjoyed, a dream, a floating thought to me; and so, that I might carry away from these dear places as much as possible, and as if they could give themselves to me, I besought them to engrave their images upon my soul, to give me something of themselves that could never pa.s.s away; and I broke off branches of boxwood, bushes, and luxurious thickets, plunging my head into their depths to breathe in the wild perfumes they exhale, to penetrate into their very essence, and speak as it were heart to heart.

"The evening pa.s.sed as usual in talking and reading. We recalled the happiness of past days; I traced a faint picture of them in this book, and we looked at it sadly, as at some dear, beautiful, dead face."

One more pa.s.sage from his journal and we will leave Maurice de Guerin in Paris. Two years from the following date he was a fashionable man of the world, capable of vieing in {418} conversation with those marvels of wit and brilliancy, the talkers of Paris; but we have to do with him only as the banished recluse, the exile from La Chenaie.

"Paris, Feb., 1834.

"O G.o.d! close my eyes, keep me from seeing all this mult.i.tude, whose presence rouses in me thoughts so bitter and discouraging. As I pa.s.s through it, let me be deaf to the sounds, inaccessible to the impressions that overwhelm me when I am in the crowd; set before my eyes some image, some vision of the things I love, a field, a valley, a moor, Le Cayla, Le Val, something in nature; I will walk with eyes fastened upon these dear forms, and pa.s.s on without a sense of suffering."

From the Month.

OF DREAMERS AND WORKERS.

Nearly all men are born either dreamers or workers; not perhaps only the one or only the other, but one of these two points is the centre of their oscillation. Like a pendulum, they can move only so far toward their opposite, some more, some less; but, like the pendulum, they invariably return to their centre. Do we not all know some man with abstracted eye, high, retreating forehead, rather refined and often slightly attenuated frame and features, and placidly resolute in demeanor, who has held the same position in the opinion of his fellow-men, or, it may be, has occupied the same bench on the Sunday quietly for twenty years or more? He is a specimen of the extreme type of dreamers--venerative, mystical, and benevolent; but to all appearance practically useless, helpless, and inert. Viewed physiologically, these men are chiefly fair-haired and of the nervous lymphatic temperament; sometimes this is combined with the bilious temperament, and in such cases (to some of which we shall have more particularly to allude) they become remarkable characters. It has been said that the religion natural to dreamers is a mild form of Buddhism; but this is probably because most Buddhists are dreamers and mystics in the highest degree. One thing is certain, dreamers are in politics either conservative or utopian, and in religion are little disposed either to reject what they have been taught or to influence others to do so. If they have been educated as Catholics, mild and devout Catholics they live and die; if as Protestants, they are unusually gentle and tolerant, and oppose alike reforms that would be innovations, and innovations that would be reforms. A man who lives by faith, thus resting on the invisible, has at times an apparent resemblance to a dreamer. It is not our object in this paper to point out the distinction, wide as it indeed is. Dreamers are the subject of wonderful anecdotes about their absence of mind: it is related of them that they forget their meals, start on a journey without their hats, walk with their eyes wide open over precipices, ride on their walking-sticks, and are surprised when toll is not demanded of them for their charger. There is no occasion to believe all these preposterous tales, but no doubt there are many very curious and perfectly well-authenticated cases of abstraction of mind so entire as to cause catastrophes both painful and ludicrous. To these men their real life is their dream, their working-day is only their interruption and annoyance. They are in heart mystics, and only need a certain activity of brain and speech to proclaim themselves as such. They possess great store of happiness within themselves, owing to their peculiarity of caring less than others for those {419} substantial and golden rewards which cause the unrest of the world. They love the unseen and mysterious better than the visible and sensuous, and would in general barter any amount of distinct and limited reality for indefinite prospects; so that the single streak of wan and dying light, which sleeps on the edge of the dark horizon, is more precious to them, as suggesting Infinity, than any view which could be offered of n.o.ble cities or fertile plains. Almost all things are to them symbolical. No action is in their thought simply what it seems to be; but there is about every deed performed, circ.u.mstance encountered, or season pa.s.sed, a secret sense of omen or prescience, of brightness or of shadow. Light becomes a sentiment calling up images of corresponding radiance and beauty, but especially perhaps that early morning light which seems, while yet sleeping, to float in on the world, as opposed to the fading colors of departing day. Darkness, again, sometimes lends a sense of peril; but more often is peopled by spirits--a realm of shadows and shadowy delights, all called into being, moved, governed, and colored by the dreamer in his dream. The many gradations between brightness and gloom have each their especial fascination for dreamers, who are in this respect as discriminative and fanciful as the Jews, who, in olden times, distinguished two kinds of twilight: the doves' twilight, or crepusculum of the day, and ravens' twilight, or the crepusculum of the night. In truth, their tendency is to behold all actual things as illusions, and to consider the spiritual and unseen world as the only true one: thus, in the cloudy mantle of constant reverie they hide all the ills and infirmities of humanity, and slumber in the "golden sleep of halcyon quiet apart from the everlasting storms of life." For when a man can sit calmly on an uncomfortable pole, like the Indian mystic, and say "I am the Universe, and the Universe is me," he has attained to the greatest conceivable height and perfection of dream-life. From the age of Plato to our own times dreamers have been born perpetually among the sons of men. St. John is claimed by them as being the most profound and loving mystic ever given to the world. There have been countless others; we need not add a list of names; those of Swedenborg, Boehmen, and Irving, will occur to the memory as representing one cla.s.s of dreamers. These leaders are, as one might predict, regarded with the extreme veneration characteristic of the order. Indeed, of some it may be chronicled, as it was of the ancient deities, Buddha, etc., "Once a man, now a G.o.d!" In general, dreamers have tenanted our madhouses rather than filled our prisons; if, however, they do commit crimes, they are serious ones. Religious and political a.s.sa.s.sinations have been commonly the fruits of mad dreamers. In the ranks have been numbered many holy men, and as a rule they have influenced mankind rather by the example of their life and the teaching of their pen than by busy practical action. Only certain professions and occupations are suitable for dreamers. In the olden times they were poets, shepherds, prophets, soothsayers, diviners, alchemists, rhabdomantists. [Footnote 68] In these days they are by rights clergymen, authors, poets, philanthropists, and, philosophers.

If they enter trade they commonly end in the _Gazette_; and placed in positions of authority, where severity of discipline has to be exercised, they are uniformly unsuccessful; in situations of trust, they are invariably single-hearted and faithful, but in every place and at all times they are the most frequent victims of fraudulent representations and impudent imposture. A certain number of the priesthood among all nations, gentle, speculative, and saintly men, {420} have been of this order; weaving their work and their dreams together into a fair fabric of many colors, which if it seems to ordinary eyes shadowy and unsubstantial as the mist, is yet, like the air, elastic, solid, and capable of resisting a very heavy pressure.

Idealists are, however, rarely formidable in action unless the bilious is largely transfused in their temperament. They then become missionaries and martyrs; patriots, revolutionists, fanatics; they head revolutions, plan ma.s.sacres, overthrow monarchies, and shatter creeds. Peter the Hermit, John of Leyden, are examples of this order.

[Footnote 68: [Greek text], _a rod_; men who undertook, and in certain unenlightened regions do still undertake, to discover wells of water, veins of minerals, or hidden treasures of money and jewels, by means of divining-rods. ]

The workers born into the world are widely different in temperament and disposition, and antagonistic in principles, sentiment, and action. They consist both of those who work with their hands alone, and of those who work up into a practical form the reveries and speculative schemes of the dreamers. Physiologically viewed, the extreme type of the worker exhibits most frequently the bullet-shaped head, square jaw, muscular, thick neck, large chest development, and elemental hand, commonly also the sanguine, sanguine-nervous, or sanguine-bilious temperament, They have an irresistible propensity to do, to acquire, to conquer or invade; they are fertile in resource, opulent in stratagem, full of quarrel, and essentially aggressive. A contest is to them an occasion of inexplicable delight; and naturally dedicated to action, they are as unable to conceive of disappointment as the other cla.s.s are to resist that which is or seems to be their destiny. They become engineers, manufacturers, merchants, inventors, mighty hunters, soldiers, sailors, pioneers, emigrants, rough-riders, pugilists, smugglers, aeronauts, acrobats, and celebrated performers in travelling circuses and menageries, lion-tamers, snake-charmers, rat-catchers, burglars, thieves, and highwaymen. They are gamekeepers, and devote their lives to circ.u.mvent and strive in mortal strife with poachers; or they are poachers, and spend their days and nights in plotting against and hara.s.sing and threatening the gamekeepers. As clergymen they are most hard-working, zealous and excellent, but also the most quarrelsome and intolerant. When they come on to the earth as younger members of the aristocracy, who may neither dig, trade, nor fight in the ring, and have not the wherewithal to keep racehorses and hunters, they enter the army or navy, and there in times of peace, when no legitimate outlet presents itself for the expenditure of these energies, they form a very insubordinate and turbulent item of the population. The lower cla.s.ses of the workers who cannot get work, then crusade against the upper cla.s.ses, who are in the same predicament; and we see the result in the perpetual placarding in some journals and newspapers of "deplorable blackguardism in high life." Three parts out of five, or even a larger proportion, of the Anglo-Saxon population are composed of workers as opposed to dreamers; and the seething unquiet ma.s.s of humanity known and described by some writers as our "dangerous cla.s.ses" is almost entirely recruited from their ranks.

Many centuries ago they were Vikings, pirates, and border robbers; they scoured the seas, made raids, reived the cattle, and levied black-mail; anon they were crusaders, for though Peter the Hermit was a dreamer, his followers were workers; subsequently they destroyed monasteries; and in these days they have made railroads and abolished the corn-laws. But, nevertheless, the men who first built churches, and dwelt in monasteries, and discovered the mysterious agency by which the engine was to do its work, were not workers, but dreamers, and were reviled in their day as visionaries and enthusiasts. Where a dreamer would have been an alchemist, a modern worker finds his mission to be a gold-digger; where one is a shepherd, the other will be a hunter or trapper:--the first works that he may retire to dream.

{421} the second dreams how he shall arise and work.

The dreamers among men select as mates the workers among women, or are (perhaps more often) selected by them, and _vice versa_. It is the old eternal law of nature--the duality pervading all things, types, and cla.s.ses, man and woman, positive and negative, matter and spirit, reason and faith; and, in spite of the gentle scorn which dreamers cherish for workers, and the undisguised contempt with which workers regard dreamers, so they will continue to exist side by side until the day comes when the worker can work no more, and the dreamer shall have dreamed for the last time.