Part 14

But she sticks to her pen just the same. Who ever failed to, that was born for it? Why, I may do good by writing, she urges. No doubt her confessor persuaded her she might, with perfect justice as regarded doing good to one person, at any rate.

But we must not emphasize too much all these petty and indifferent preoccupations. None of them really counted, none of them was more than a trifle beside the paramount, absorbing interest of Mademoiselle de Guérin’s life. Not a page, hardly a paragraph, of her Journal but has some allusion to God, to her desire for God, her thirst for God, her complete, entire reference of all things earthly to what was, for her, at any rate, their origin, their purpose, and their end. She has words of marvellous mystical subtlety and grace, though the constant impression is more powerful than any single words. “When a brook runs, it starts full of foam and turmoil and grows clearer as it travels. The road I wander in is God, or a friend, but above all, God. In Him I run my course and find repose.” “In this vast silence, when God only speaks to me, my soul is ravished and dead to everything else, above, below, within, without; but the rapture does not last.”

Alas, no, it does not last. These ecstasies never do, whether earthly or heavenly, unless in heaven. And persons who spend their lives in waiting for them are apt to view the common, petty joys of earth with discontent. This was unquestionably the case with Mademoiselle de Guérin. A word less frequent than God in her Journal is ennui, but it is frequent enough. People bore her, society bores her, little daily duties bore her. She endures them and keeps a brave face because God bids, but the ennui is there just the same.

Nor is it only ennui. She sees a vast amount of positive evil in life. “Pessimism is half of saintliness,” says an excellent authority. It was at least half of Mademoiselle de Guérin’s. Besides general human suffering and cruelty and neglect, she has a set of individual troubles which seem avoidable, some doubt as to her own salvation and very considerable doubt as to the salvation of others. These things keep dark clouds over her until the sun has hard work to break through. She speaks perpetually of graves and death, always, to be sure, to draw a moral lesson from them; but cannot moral lessons be drawn from sweeter things? Even the great Christian poet, Donne, while expressing a preference for the grave, found other matters more attractive still.

“I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay With graves than cradles to wear out a day.”

But Mademoiselle de Guérin is more than “half in love with easeful death” and inclines to woo him with all the strange fancies of Constance in “King John.” “Hippolyte talks to me of Marie, of another world, of his grief, of you, of death, of all the things I love so much.”

One is inclined to break in on a strain so morbid and abnormal with reminders of “earthlier happy is the rose distilled,” or with the somewhat brutal Philistinism of Horace Greeley’s comment on his dear friend, Margaret Fuller, “A good husband and two or three bouncing babies would have emancipated her from a good deal of cant and nonsense.”

But, though Mademoiselle de Guérin might herself have been happier as a normal wife and mother, she would not have left us the fine, elaborate analysis of an exquisite soul.

THE END

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