PAGE 17
Joan Of Arc
by
[NOTE 7.
Amongst the many ebullitions of M. Michelet’s fury against us poor English, are four which will be likely to amuse the reader; and they are the more conspicuous in collision with the justice which he sometimes does us, and the very indignant admiration which, under some aspects, he grants to us.
1. Our English literature he admires with some gnashing of teeth. He pronounces it “fine and sombre,” but, I lament to add, “sceptical, Judaic, Satanic–in a word, Anti-Christian.” That Lord Byron should figure as a member of this diabolical corporation, will not surprise men. It will surprise them to hear that Milton is one of its Satanic leaders. Many are the generous and eloquent Frenchmen, beside Chateaubriand, who have, in the course of the last thirty years, nobly suspended their own burning nationality, in order to render a more rapturous homage at the feet of Milton; and some of them have raised Milton almost to a level with angelic natures. Not one of them has thought of looking for him below the earth. As to Shakspeare, M. Michelet detects in him a most extraordinary mare’s nest. It is this: he does “not recollect to have seen the name of God” in any part of his works. On reading such words, it is natural to rub one’s eyes, and suspect that all one has ever seen in this world may have been a pure ocular delusion. In particular, I begin myself to suspect that the word “la gloire” never occurs in any Parisian journal. “The great English nation,” says M. Michelet, “has one immense profound vice,” to wit, “pride.” Why, really, that may be true; but we have a neighbor not absolutely clear of an “immense profound vice,” as like ours in color and shape as cherry to cherry. In short, M. Michelet thinks us, by fits and starts, admirable, only that we are detestable; and he would adore some of our authors, were it not that so intensely he could have wished to kick them.
2. M. Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very odd remark upon Thomas a Kempis: which is, that a man of any conceivable European blood–a Finlander, suppose, or a Zantiote–might have written Tom; only not an Englishman. Whether an Englishman could have forged Tom, must remain a matter of doubt, unless the thing had been tried long ago. That problem was intercepted for ever by Tom’s perverseness in choosing to manufacture himself. Yet, since nobody is better aware than M. Michelet, that this very point of Kempis having manufactured Kempis is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three or four nations claiming to have forged his work for him, the shocking old doubt will raise its snaky head once more–whether this forger, who rests in so much darkness, might not, after all, be of English blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to modern English literature chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar’s (Dr. Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is described as
“Kempis Tom,
Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come.”
Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of John Wesley. Amongst those few, however, happens to be myself; which arose from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received a copy of the De Imitatione Christi, as a bequest from a relation, who died very young; from which cause, and from the external prettiness of the book, being a Glasgow reprint, by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily bound, I was induced to look into it; and finally read it many times over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its simplicity and devotional fervor; but much more from the savage delight I found in laughing at Tom’s Latinity. That, I freely grant to M. Michelet, is inimitable; else, as regards substance, it strikes me that I could forge a better De Imitatione myself. But there is no knowing till one tries. Yet, after all, it is not certain whether the original was Latin. But, however that may have been, if it is possible that M. Michelet[A] can be accurate in saying that there are no less than sixty French versions (not editions, observe, but separate versions) existing of the De Imitatione, how prodigious must have been the adaptation of the book to the religious heart of the fifteenth century! Excepting the Bible, but excepting that only in Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the same distinction. It is the most marvellous bibliographical fact on record.