mand in respect to our neighbour. It has even been quoted as a reason for not making great sacrifices for him, on the ground that we should not like any one to do so much for us; and were not this right, indeed, if there were not with it that which is the condition of this loving our neighbour as ourself, viz. the absolute, all-absorbing love to God? If we have thought of what loving God is, then is not the place of the neighbour plain? Does it not mean that individuals are not to be to us as man, as the world? that that is to be the first, and all men thought of and served for it?

"For what is loving God? Is it the love one gives one's lap-dog? Is not the only true love sympathy in God's work, devotion to that which the loved One loves, in which He lives. Is any other love worthy of the name, least of all any other love to God? Is not this the only true thought of love to God, devotion to His work, absolute desire and care for that, a passion, ruling and absorbing all, for man's life, for the world and its redemption? and all else that assumes its name, all devotion that is not devotion to some good, some work that is His work, is it not mere superstition? Man, man's life, the growing into life of the world, all passion for serving that is the love of God, all else is mockery.

Then see this in the command, Love God with all your soul, be devoted with all your passion, with every power, so that there is nothing in you that is not absolutely absorbed in it, to man's life. And then love your neighbour too, man being men. But then love not so; love them as yourself-as yourself, which you subordinate utterly and devote to man, so love them, so devote them.

Is it not a revelation to us of the way to love them? For them, also, how can we love otherwise than in so using them, even as ourselves for God, in man? Thus loving them is loving them most, most honouring them, giving them most. To be loved more than God is to be unloved; to be set above humanity is to be cast below the beasts; the other love is the true love, which must give the best, which must accept, that the beloved may give. This command, how beautiful it is. It is God fulfilling for us the condition of our being able to accept sacrifice from our friend, our child, our nearest and dearest, and so to give them the best; enabling them to love them with a worthy love, and accept from them, because accepting from them, not for ourselves, but for Him. For truly without that great and absolute love to God which leaves no other love besides, but must include all loving in itself or exclude it wholly, there were no possible love to man that were not mockery, and did not mean pampering, which is scorn. To be able to love, we must be able to accept, and that must be for another.' (Pp. 263, 264.)

Is not this the solution of the difficulty which has so often perplexed those who love another human being passionately, and doubt whether this love helps or hinders their highest life? If they keep in mind that the highest good for the person loved, as well as for themselves, is service to the world, and not merely the selfish enjoyment of each other's mutual love, then they cannot love too deeply. The deeper and stronger their love becomes, the higher and nobler they will always grow, and the 'infinite range' rises ever before them as they go on. Again he writes:

"The key of my treatment of people, especially of those I love, I know, is that I cannot feel any other way than that every one wishes most, and is perfectly willing, to be utterly sacrificed for the good of the world. It seems as if Christ had so revealed man to me that I cannot see any man except through Him.

'And, indeed, this is the secret of what some call my tact. I treat men as if no self were in them; and this is true, after all, though not true. Especially it makes women feel I understand them. I take it for granted there is no self in them, and they know it is true. It is the fact of them. A woman will always

love the man who says to her, "Lay down your life," better than the man who says, "Take up your rights." "That's true in the abstract, in theory," one of Mr. Hinton's most intimate friends once answered. "Half my life I feel that I want no consideration, only to be made use of; that I have enough, and care only for being of use. But the other half of one's time one yearns for sympathy and kindness, and to be cared for." He smiled and said, "Don't you see, women were made in that way, in order that real sacrifice might be possible to them? There is no sacrifice in giving what one does not care for. That is just the little 'minus' which was necessary to make the 'plus' possible, and people have thought that little minus, which was meant to be sacrificed, was the whole of women, and have treated them by yielding to that, and considering them,' and given them 'nice things,' instead of making them of use, as they long to be.

"It is in those we love," he says, "sacrificing themselves, and our accepting it; it is in that we shall truly learn sacrifice. Do we not here see in light the dark riddle of God's cruelty? What does He do but take? So He gives us sacrifice. How could He keep the best thing for Himself? how not give it to us?" (P. 293.)

There are several charming little touches in the book which show us how James Hinton reduced his theories to practice: e.g. where we find him remonstrating most earnestly with his wife because she did not wish to ask a very poor and rather dirty neighbour to make use of their house while she was absent on a visit. He says pathetically :— 'That sensitiveness of your senses to dirt makes you blind. If you could see my heart as well, and what you do for the sake of a clean house, you'd make it a pigsty first!'

Here is a letter about his little girl's education :

There is one thing I wanted to say to you; whatever of good or bad there may be in her, I want there not to be this, the shame and deception of our modern life, the feeling that first satisfying our own pleasures, and then putting out our hands to help others, is good. She must not have that which I find everywhere the grafting of devotion to God and man on first surrounding ourselves with every comfort and pleasure; recognising what we do of our duty to God, and then first surrounding ourselves with houses and lands as nice as we can get them for our own pleasures, and on that grafting the doing something, be it little or much, for our fellows. Let her feel at least that she has to choose between God and Mammon.'

But perhaps the most touching anecdote is of his going into the Alhambra with a friend, who tells the story, and talking to the women who resorted there:

'We were very soon surrounded by women He took no notice of them, but held me by the coat with both hands, and looked me in the face and began quietly talking about "unconscious sacrifice." Soon his gentle speech attracted the notice of the women, who grouped themselves around him, with the policemen who attend to keep order (the acting was all the time going on on the stage), and all were spell-bound while he sweetly discoursed on Christ's hatred of sin and pity for the sinner; and finished a most touching address of some ten minutes by saying, "If our Saviour were on earth, where would He be? Why here!" And then we left, and my dear friend wiped tears from his eyes.'

Here this little sketch must end, premising that many of James Hinton's lines of thought have not even been alluded to. The book will repay any one who takes the trouble to study it; but there are

There are

two classes of readers who will be specially grateful to it. those who are spending their lives in hard work for the service of others, but who do it as a task for the satisfaction of their own consciences rather than for love of those to whom they minister. They cannot but feel it is a marvellous lightening of their burden if they learn from James Hinton to shift their aim, so to speak, from their own satisfaction to the needs of the world; to feel that service is the reward, not the task by which the reward is earned. And there are others whose intellectual belief, with all their best efforts, remains hazy and uncertain, and they are doubtful how to go on at all until it clears. Hinton's system of morality supplies a track which will at least lead them in the right direction. For if they can grant that good is so infinitely better than evil as to be worth following at all costs and at any sacrifice, and that the only good worth following or desiring is service to others; and if, having granted this, they can bring themselves patiently and humbly to follow the good they see, while they wait as Hinton once waited for fuller light; surely they have entered on a path by which they are following, however imperfectly, the footsteps of Him whose work was the salvation of the world. And at last this path cannot fail to bring them to Him; for what is the service of the world but that Will, which, if a man desire to do, he shall know of the doctrine?

M. BRAMSTON.

FRENCH LITERATURE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY.

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE ATELIER DU LYS,' 'FAIR ELSE,' ETC.

VIII.-ALFRED DE MUSSET.

In a series of studies on modern French poets it is impossible to omit Alfred de Musset, and most difficult to know how to speak of him. There is so strange a double nature revealed in his works that we involuntarily think of Sintram and the Little Master; but it is a Sintram not conquering, but conquered. As is too often the case with a still greater poet, Victor Hugo, we find ecstatic ideality and gross materialism side by side. It is a phenomenon constantly seen in men of that generation; and mingled with it is the deep melancholy which, as De Musset tells us in one of his most eloquent passages, beset those born amid the tumult and excitement and heartbreaks of Napoleon's wars. It is as if death stretched out its hand through a shower of roses. We may take as an example his play, Les Caprices de Marianne, which reads like a leaf out of some family chronicle of the Middle Ages. Marianne is the young wife of Claudio, a gloomy and jealous Neapolitan, with no doubt a dash of the Spaniard in him. She is passionately loved by Celio, who employs his gay and unscrupulous friend, Ottavio, to plead his cause to her careless ears. In mere idle caprice she gives a knot of her ribbons to Ottavio, and says, if he will serenade her, she will listen. He passes on the knot to Celio, bidding him keep the appointment. The portrait of old Claudio is excellent; we see that his suspicions are aroused; this knot of ribbon is a death-warrant. Harsh, suspicious, absurd, Claudio is yet gloomily formidable. Celio is stabbed under Marianne's window by a hired assassin, and dies, persuaded that his friend has betrayed him; and Ottavio, so far indeed innocent, yet overwhelmed by remorse, bids Naples, hope, and joy, farewell. Marianne, whose idle heart has strayed to him, astonished and mortified, asks why this agony answers 'I never loved you: it was Celio;' and thus the drama closes. The conclusion, 'On ne badine pas avec l'amour,' is equally gloomy; and while in Les Caprices de Marianne we feel, in spite of the light and brilliant dialogue, Nemesis approaching ever nearer and nearer, in the second play the crash of discord at the end is totally unexpected. Grace and sparkling gaiety, and a cry of pain so acute that it thrills through the reader, are the two characteristics of De Musset's works. He is like his Cavale dans le Désert, dying close to the spring of water which would save its life, unconscious of its neighbourhood.

He

'Lorsque dans le désert la cavale sauvage

Après trois jours de marche, attend un jour d'orage
Pour boire l'eau du ciel sur ses palmiers poudreux,
Le soleil est de plomb, les palmiers en silence
Sous leur ciel embrasé penchent leurs longs cheveux,
Elle cherche son puit dans le désert immense,
Le soleil l'a séché; sur le rocher brûlant,
Les lions hérissés dorment en grommelant.
Elle se sent fléchir ; ses narines qui saignent
S'enfoncent dans le sable, et le sable altéré
Vient boire avidement son sang décoloré.
Alors elle se couche, et ses grands yeux s'éteignent,
Et le pale désert roule sur son enfant
Les flots silencieux de son linceul mourant.
Elle ne savait pas, lorsque les caravanes,

Avec leurs chameliers passaient sous les platanes,
Qu'elle n'avait qu'à suivre et qu'à baisser le front
Pour trouver à Bagdad de fraîches écuries,
Des râteliers dorés, des luzernes fleuries,

Et des puits dont le ciel n'a jamais vu le fond!'

To the eye of a Christian the explanation of that melancholy which preyed on the generation to which De Musset belonged is the want of any living faith. Men would fain have been Epicureans, but they could not enjoy the roses of life from the obstinate consciousness of how soon the garlands would fade. Theirs was a more hopeless melancholy than that of the cultivated heathen, because they had nothing of the stern virtue of the Stoics; and, since Christianity had perforce set before them its pure and high ideal, theirs was a worse state than that of Greek or Roman, for they had glimpses of something which would have satisfied them, could they but have grasped it. The times, too, were such as to make life peculiarly difficult. The Church in France appeared at the Restoration to the utmost disadvantage, struggling to regain the privileges and possessions wrested from her by the Revolution, and presenting herself as the opponent to reform and progress; the air was full of petty plots; proscriptions abounded; a White terror had replaced the Red one. The great revival in which Ozanam acted so grand a part had not yet begun, and infidelity was openly taught by almost every professor in Paris. Some robust characters resisted the depressing influences of the time by temperament and hard work, but De Musset had no work in him. Drudgery was abhorrent to him; he would only write when in the mood, and in reply to a remonstrance from one who recognised that perseverance in the face of weariness is a condition of success, he exclaimed that he was not a maid of all work! In this he was a remarkable contrast to Balzac or Victor Hugo. On one occasion, when the latter found himself face to face with an agreement to deliver a MS. of a novel not even begun, he bought a large bottle of ink and a woollen garment, locked up all the clothes fit to go out of doors in, and set to work. The bottle of ink just lasted out, and he threatened to call the book Une bouteille d'Encre. Later, Alphonse Karr really did use this title.