A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet
JOURNEYING down the Rh?ne on a summers day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks iain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god sweeping down the feeble geions whose breath is in their nostrils and making their dwellings a desolation. Strange trast, you may have thought, between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of onplace houses, whi their best days were but the sign of a sordid life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era - and the effect produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps, that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain pine: nay, even in the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by ah-born race who had ied from their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance! If those robber barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them - they were forest boars with tusks tearing and rending, not the ordinary domestic gruhey represehe demon forces for ever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life: they made a fine trast in the picture with the wandering mihe soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse and the timid Israelite. That was a time of colour when the sunlight fell on glang steel and floating banners: a time of adventure and fierce struggle - nay, of living, religious art and religious enthusiasm; for were not cathedrals built in those days and did not great emperors leave their western palaces to die before the irongholds in the sacred east? Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry: they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and raise up for me the vision of an epoch. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rh?ne, oppress me with the feeling that human life - very much of it - is a narrow, ugly, grovellience, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of ception; and I have a cruel vi that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the geions of ants and beavers. Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watg this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragi-ic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons - irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renoung faith - moved by none of those wild, untrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and crime - without that primitive rough simplicity of wants, that hard submissive ill-paid toil, that child-like spelling-out of what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here, one has ventional worldly notions and habits without instru and without polish - surely the most prosai of human life: proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build: worldliness without side-dishes. these people narrowly, evehe iron hand of misfortune has shaken them from their uioning hold on the world, one sees little trace ion, still less of a distinctively Christian creed.