despondency, weighed upon him like an incubus: "I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was wholly out of our own power. I often said to myself, What a relief it would be if I could disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances!"*

He tries to escape from the fatal web in which his soul hung helpless; but sophisms and quibbles of the brain cannot minister to a mind diseased or pluck sorrow from the heart.

But the saddest part of Mill's Autobiography is the portion devoted to the woman whose friendship he called the honor and chief blessing of his existence. The picture which he has drawn of his childhood is at once painful and ludi

crous.

He does not even incidentally allude to a single fact which would lead one to suppose that he had a mother or had ever known a mother's love.

al

The father, as described by the son, was cold, fanatical, morose, most inhuman, acting as though he thought children are born merely for the purpose of being crammed with Greek roots and logical formulas. John Stuart was put at Greek vocables when only three years old. His father demanded of him not only the utmost that he could do, but much that it was utterly impossible that he should do. He was guilty, for instance, of the incredible folly of making him read the Dialogues of Plato when only seven years old. He never knew

* P. 169

anything of the freshness or joyousness of childhood, or what it is to be "boy eternal." He grew up without the companionship of children, blighted and dwarfed by the abiding presence of the narrow and unnatural man who nipped the flower of his life in the bud, and repressed within him all the sentiments and aspirations which are the spontaneous and healthful product of youth. He was not taught to delight in sunshine and flowers, and music and song; but even in his boyish rambles there strode ever by his side the analytical machine, dissecting, destroying, marring God's work with his lifeless, hopeless theories. The effect of this training was, as we have already seen, that when the boy became a man, he found himself like a ship on the ocean without sail or compass, and there gathered around his life the settled gloom of despair, which his philosophical opinions tended only to deepen.

Without a mother's love, without a father whom it was possible to love, without friends of his own age, without God, dejected, despondent, hopeless, he met the wife of a friend of his father, who, from the manner in which she controlled her first and second husbands, must have been a clever woman, and he became an idolater, giving to her the adoration which his father had taught him to withhold from God. That there is no exaggeration in this statement every one who will take the trouble to read the seventh chapter of Mill's Autobiography will be ready to confess.

He married this woman in 1851, when he was forty-five and she but two years younger, and seven years later her death occurred. Mill wishes the world to believe that this woman was the prodigy of the

XIXth century, surpassing in intellectual vigor and moral strength all men and all other women; that to her he owed all that is best in his own writings; and that he is but the interpreter of the wonderful thoughts of this incomparable woman, whom others have deemed merely a commonplace woman's rights woman.

"Thus prepared," he writes, "it will easily be believed that when I came into close intellectual communion with a person of the most eminent faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded itself in thought, struck out truths far in advance of me, but in which I could not, as I had done in those others, detect any mixture of error, the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in the assimilation of those truths; and the most valuable part of my intellectual work was in building the bridges and clearing the paths which connected them with my general system of thought.'

*

Mill seems to have been incapable of a healthful sentiment of any kind. The same quality in his stunted and warped moral nature which caused him to have a false and exaggerated sense of the evil that is in the world, leading him to atheism, made him a blind and superstitious worshipper of the imaginary endowments of his wife. But one must read the book itself to realize how far he carried this idolatry.

When she dies, he again sinks into the gloom which his superstition had seemed to cause him partially to forget; and if he continues to work, it is only with the feeble

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strength "derived from thoughts of her and communion with her memory." Her death was a calamity which took from him all hope, and he found some slight alleviation only in the mode of life which best enabled him to feel her still near him.

She died at Avignon, and he bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she was buried; and there he settled down in helpless misery, feeling that all that remained to him in the world was a memory.

"Her memory," he writes, "is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up, as it does, all worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my life."*

He did not believe in God, in the soul, in a life beyond life; he had scarcely any faith in the practical efforts of the age to improve the condition of the masses, upon whom he looked as the common herd; his own countrymen especially he despised as selfish and narrow above all other men, grovelling in their instincts, and low in the objects which they aim at; happiness he held to be the sole end of existence; and at the close of his life, an old man, in a foreign land, in immedicable misery, he stood beside a grave, and sought with feeble fingers to clutch the shadow of a dream, which he called his religion; and so he died.

We have never read a sadder book, nor one which to our mind contains stronger proof that the soul longs with an infinite craving for God, and, not finding him, will worship anything—a woman, a stone, a memory.

XVI.

HOWEVER, our good friends at Muiceron had not become, believe me, so entirely perverted by vanity as to lose all remembrance of the past. They could not have lived twenty years with a boy as perfect in conduct and affection as JeanLouis without missing him as the days rolled on.

I acknowledge, nevertheless, that the first week passed so quickly in the midst of the flurry and fuss of the marriage contract and presents -bought on credit-that the absence of the good child was scarcely felt; but, towards the end of the second week, one evening Pierrette asked Ragaud if the time had not nearly expired that Jean-Louis had been lent to Michou for the clearing of the forest of Montreux; "for," said she, “I cannot live any longer without him, he was of so much use to me, and the house is so empty without him."

"I gave him for a fortnight," replied Ragaud, "and I would not disoblige Michou by reclaiming him before; but I think we will see him next week, and then I hope he will be over his little miff."

66 What miff?" asked Pierrette. Bless me! wife, you are a little too simple if you have not noticed long before this how sullen the boy has become."

"He never says much," replied Pierrette," and we have all been so very busy lately, it has made him more silent even than usual."

"That is precisely it," said Ragaud. "You have petted him so much, he fancied everything was his; and when he saw us so occupied with Jeannette's marriage, he took it in dudgeon, and became offended."

"That would be very wrong in him," replied La Ragaude, "and I don't believe Jeannet capable of such wicked sentiments. Jealousy is not one of his faults; on the contrary, he always thinks of others before himself."

"That may be, that may be, but you cannot judge of wine, no matter how old you may know it to be, before tasting; and, in the same way, you cannot answer for any quality of the heart until it has been tried. So it was very easy for Jeannet not to be jealous when there was no subject for jealousy; but, if you were not always blind and deaf to his defects, you would acknowledge that from the day that Isidore put his foot in this house he has changed as much as milk turned into curds."

"That may all be," said Pierrette, who could not answer her husband's objections.

"That may all be so easily that it is positively so," replied Ragaud, "and Jeannet will not re-enter this house until I have spoken very plainly to him, and made him promise to treat Isidore as a brother."

Jeannette, for her part, had a little secret annoyance that she carefully concealed, but which made her more irritable and less docile than usual, greatly to the astonishment of Pierrette, who thought her to be at the summit of happiness. After being rather sullen with Jeannet, because he did not appear delighted with her marriage, and, above all, with her intended, she was now displeased to see Isidore parading before every one-and to her the first-his great satisfaction at the departure of Jean-Louis. He even seemed to seek every occasion to speak injuriously of him before her parents, and allowed no one to praise him in his presence. The child was not very patient, we already know, and, as Solange truly said, her head alone was dazzled; her heart was not spoiled enough to make her lose her good sense. Still further, she began to feel very uneasy on a subject which she wished to understand clearly before finally engaging herself—it was that of religion. She had felt the ground around Perdreau, and, although he was as hypocritical as the devil, he had attempted several very disagreeable jokes about the church and her ceremonies which, I must say, provoked Jeannette to such a degree, she openly showed her displeasure. Thereupon Isidore, seeing that he had gone too far, and that he must be more careful or he would lose her dowry, tried to play the part of a saint in his niche; but it was a comedy in which he was not well skilled from want of practice, and Jeannette, more and more worried and unhappy, commenced to regret that the good and wise Jeannet was no longer at her side to aid her with his advice, of which she had never before felt such urgent need.

So she, in her turn, hazarded the same request as Pierrette, and asked her father when they might expect the return of Jean-Louis.

Ragaud made her nearly the same reply as he had done to his wife, without mentioning his ideas in relation to Jeannet's supposed jealousy; and Jeannette patiently awaited him.

But the fortnight went by without any sign of the boy, and it could be easily perceived that Jeannette was becoming nervous-a kind of sickness little known in the country even by name, but which mademoiselle's example had taught Jeannette to attempt whenever things did not go on exactly as she wished. However, affairs went on precisely as those rascally Perdreaux desired. The marriagecontract was prepared, and, after an immense scrawl of big words, which Ragaud did not understand, it concluded by making the good man abandon all his personal and landed property to his daughter, only reserving for himself a moderate annuity. Ragaud was ashamed to avow that all this waste paper was entirely above his comprehension. He tried to look very wise, but proved by his questions that he was caught in a trap; for, after the reading of the knavish document, which stripped him of everything, he innocently asked if he would retain the right to manage Muiceron, and live there as master during his life.

"Undoubtedly," replied the notary; "your children would be unnatural to let it be otherwise. I have done all for the best, for I suppose you do not wish to oblige my son to marry under the dotal law?"

"What is the dotal law?" said Ragaud.

"It is the greatest disgrace that can be imposed on a man," gravely replied the notary.

"Oh! I beg pardon, M. Perdreau; and so in your paper there is no question of that ?"

66

Certainly not," said the notary. "I have drawn up the papers for the good father and honorable man that you are."

Then it is all right, and I have nothing more to do but to thank you," said the honest farmer.

"We could both sign it this evening," said the head rascal.

"There is no hurry," said Ragaud; "we will do that when all the family are present, before my wife and the children. Jeannet to sign it also."

I wish

"Sign? Your Jean-Louis can't sign it," said the notary, "as he has no name; the law, M. Ragaud, does not recognize illegitimate children." "Really! That is cruel for the boy, monsieur; at least, I would like him to hear the paper read."

"For what reason?"

"To please him, that is all; he has been like a child to us for twenty years, and has never deserved to be driven from the family."

"As you please; I think it useless. In business, you see, there is no such thing as sentiment; however, if you prefer it . . ."

"I certainly do prefer it," replied Ragaud firmly. "I have been a just man all my life, monsieur, and I do not wish now to act unjustly toward a child who has always served me so faithfully."

The notary did not reply, but his ugly weasel-face showed such bitter displeasure that Ragaud, already dissatisfied with the conversation, suddenly remembered Jacques Michou's remarks, and promised himself to keep his eyes open.

Fortunately, the good God gives

to honest men a sense of distrust which is easily sharpened. The peasant, in particular, is never entirely at ease when spoken to in more difficult language than two and two make four. Now, Ragaud, on account of his vanity, did not wish to acknowledge before others that he understood nothing of all the fine writing on the stamped paper, but he avowed it to himself, and, putting on a perfectly innocent air, he said to Perdreau:

"Will you have the kindness to let me have the papers for a few days? I would like to read them over again when I have time."

it to

"Very willingly," replied the notary, well convinced-and there he was right-that good Ragaud could not decipher the handwriting, and that it would be all Greek to him. "I was even going to propose you. Take them, M. Ragaud, and read them at your leisure; but I need not tell you that it must remain a secret between us until the day the contract is signed."

"I understand," replied Ragaud. "I know how to be discreet, monsieur, and I am not more desirous than you that my daughter's affairs should be known all over the neighborhood."

He did not speak falsely in promising it; for to a Christian the word of a priest is sacred, and he only intended to let the curé read the contract under the seal of confession.

The next day it so happened that M. Perdreau went to the city, where he expected to pass two days, to plan an affair still worse than the rest, which you will know in due time. Ragaud, thus having the field clear, hurried off to Val-Saint, with the papers carefully folded under his blouse.

That morning Jeannette was not