Buildings become tombs when the race that constructed them has
disappeared. Libraries and manuscripts are catacombs where
most of us might wander in the dark forever, finding no
issue. To know dead generations and their environments
through these channels, to feel a love so strong that it calls
the past forth from its winding-sheet, and gives it life again,
as Christ did Lazarus, is the privilege only of great
historians.
France is honoring the memory of such a man at this moment;
one who for forty years sought the vital spark of his
country’s existence, striving to resuscitate what he called
“the great soul of history,” as it developed through
successive acts of the vast drama. This employment of his
genius is Michelet’s title to fame.
In a sombre structure, the tall windows of which look across
the Luxembourg trees to the Pantheon, where her husband’s
bust has recently been placed, a widow preserves with religious
care the souvenirs of this great historian. Nothing that
can recall either his life or his labor is changed.
Madame Michelet’s life is in strange contrast with the
ways of the modern spouse who, under pretext of grief, discards
and displaces every reminder of the dead. In our day, when
the great art is to forget, an existence consecrated to a memory
is so rare that the world might be the better for knowing that a
woman lives who, young and beautiful, was happy in the society of
an old man, whose genius she appreciated and cherished, who loves
him dead as she loved him living. By her care the apartment
remains as it stood when he left it, to die at
Hyères,—the furniture, the paintings, the
writing-table. No stranger has sat in his chair, no
acquaintance has drunk from his cup. This woman, who was a
perfect wife and now fills one’s ideal of what a
widow’s life should be, has constituted herself the
vigilant guardian of her husband’s memory. She loves
to talk of the illustrious dead, and tell how he was fond of
saying that Virgil and Vico were his parents. Any one who
reads the Georgics or The Bird will see the truth
of this, for he loved all created things, his ardent spiritism
perceiving that the essence which moved the ocean’s tides
was the same that sang in the robin at the window during his last
illness, which he called his “little captive
soul.”
The author of La Bible de l’Humanité had
to a supreme degree the love of country, and possessed the power
of reincarnating with each succeeding cycle of its history.
So luminous was his mind, so profound and far-reaching his
sympathy, that he understood the obscure workings of the
mediæval mind as clearly as he appreciated Mirabeau’s
transcendent genius. He believed that humanity, like
Prometheus, was self-made; that nations modelled their own
destiny during the actions and reactions of history, as each one
of us acquires a personality through the struggles and
temptations of existence, by the evolving power every soul
carries within itself.
Michelet taught that each nation was the hero of its own
drama; that great men have not been different from the rest of
their race—on the contrary, being the condensation of an
epoch, that, no matter what the apparent eccentricities of a
leader may have been, he was the expression of a people’s
spirit. This discovery that a race is transformed by its
action upon itself and upon the elements it absorbs from without,
wipes away at a stroke the popular belief in “predestined
races” or providential “great men” appearing at
crucial moments and riding victorious across the world.
An historian, if what he writes is to have any value, must
know the people, the one great historical factor.
Radicalism in history is the beginning of truth. Guided by
this light of his own, Michelet discovered a fresh factor
heretofore unnoticed, that vast fermentation which in France
transforms all foreign elements into an integral part of the
country’s being. After studying his own land through
the thirteen centuries of her growth, from the chart of
Childebert to the will of Louis XVI., Michelet declared that
while England is a composite empire and Germany a region, France
is a personality. In consequence he regarded the history of
his country as a long dramatic poem. Here we reach the
inner thought of the historian, the secret impulse that guided
his majestic pen.
The veritable hero of his splendid Iliad is at first ignorant
and obscure, seeking passionately like Œdipus to know
himself. The interest of the piece is absorbing. We
can follow the gradual development of his nature as it becomes
more attractive and sympathetic with each advancing age, until,
through the hundred acts of the tragedy, he achieves a
soul. For Michelet to write the history of his country was
to describe the long evolution of a hero. He was fond of
telling his friends that during the Revolution of July, while he
was making his translation of Vico, this great fact was revealed
to him in the blazing vision of a people in revolt. At that
moment the young and unknown author resolved to devote his life,
his talents, his gift of clairvoyance, the magic of his
inimitable style and creative genius, to fixing on paper the
features seen in his vision.
Conceived and executed in this spirit, his history could be
but a stupendous epic, and proves once again the truth of
Aristotle’s assertion that there is often greater truth in
poetry than in prose.
Seeking in the remote past for the origin of his hero,
Michelet pauses first before the Cathedral. The poem
begins like some mediæval tale. The first years of
his youthful country are devoted to a mystic religion.
Under his ardent hands vast naves rise and belfries touch the
clouds. It is but a sad and cramped development, however;
statutes restrain his young ardor and chill his blood. It
is not until the boy is behind the plough in the fields and
sunlight that his real life begins—a poor, brutish
existence, if you will, but still life. The
“Jacques,” half man and half beast, of the Middle
Ages is the result of a thousand years of suffering.
A woman’s voice calls this brute to arms. An enemy
is overrunning the land. Joan the virgin—“my
Joan,” Michelet calls her—whose heart bleeds when
blood is shed, frees her country. A shadow, however, soon
obscures this gracious vision from Jacques’s eyes.
The vast monarchical incubus rises between the people and their
ideal. Our historian turns in disgust from the later French
kings. He has neither time nor heart to write their
history, so passes quickly from Louis XI. to the great climax of
his drama—the Revolution. There we find his hero,
emerging at last from tyranny and oppression. Freedom and
happiness are before him. Alas! his eyes, accustomed to the
dim light of dungeons, are dazzled by the sun of liberty; he
strikes friend and foe alike.
In the solitary galleries of the “Archives”
Michelet communes with the great spirits of that day, Desaix,
Marceau, Kleber,—elder sons of the Republic, who whisper
many secrets to their pupil as he turns over faded pages tied
with tri-colored ribbons, where the cities of France have written
their affection for liberty, love-letters from Jacques to his
mistress. Michelet is happy. His long labor is
drawing to an end. The great epic which he has followed as
it developed through the centuries is complete. His hero
stands hand in hand before the altar with the spouse of his
choice, for whose smile he has toiled and struggled. The
poet-historian sees again in the Fête de la
Fédération the radiant face of his vision, the
true face of France, La Dulce.
Through all the lyricism of this master’s work one feels
that he has “lived” history as he wrote it, following
his subject from its obscure genesis to a radiant
apotheosis. The faithful companion of Michelet’s age
has borne witness to this power which he possessed of projecting
himself into another age and living with his subject. She
repeats to those who know her how he trembled in passion and
burned with patriotic emotion in transcribing the crucial pages
of his country’s history, rejoicing in her successes and
depressed by her faults, like the classic historian who refused
with horror to tell the story of his compatriots’ defeat at
Cannæ, saying, “I could not survive the
recital.”
“Do you remember,” a friend once asked Madame
Michelet, “how, when your husband was writing his chapters
on the Reign of Terror, he ended by falling ill?”
“Ah, yes!” she replied. “That was the
week he executed Danton. We were living in the country near
Nantes. The ground was covered with snow. I can see
him now, hurrying to and fro under the bare trees, gesticulating
and crying as he walked, ‘How can I judge them, those great
men? How can I judge them?’ It was in this way
that he threw his ‘thousand souls’ into the past and
lived in sympathy with all men, an apostle of universal
love. After one of these fecund hours he would drop into
his chair and murmur, ‘I am crushed by this work. I
have been writing with my blood!’”
Alas, his aged eyes were destined to read sadder pages than he
had ever written, to see years as tragic as the
“Terror.” He lived to hear the recital of
(having refused to witness) his country’s humiliation, and
fell one April morning, in his retirement near Pisa, unconscious
under the double shock of invasion and civil war. Though he
recovered later, his horizon remained dark. The patriot
suffered to see party spirit and warring factions rending the
nation he had so often called the pilot of humanity’s bark,
which seemed now to be going straight on the rocks.
“Finis Galliæ,” murmured the historian,
who to the end lived and died with his native land.
Thousands yearly mount the broad steps of the Panthéon
to lay their wreaths upon his tomb, and thousands more in every
Gallic schoolroom are daily learning, in the pages of his
history, to love France la Dulce.
