Book 4 - Chapter 1

A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet

Journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt the
sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in
certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose,
like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations
whose breath is in their nostrils, and making their thought, between
the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace
houses, which in 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 an earth-born race, who had inherited 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 grunter; they represented the demon forces forever in
collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life; they made
a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, the
soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That
was a time of color, when the sunlight fell on glancing 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 infidel strongholds 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 echo. But these dead-tinted,
hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me
with the feeling that human life--very much of it--is a narrow, ugly,
grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather
tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a
cruel conviction 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 generations of ants and beavers.

Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed
upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of
the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level
of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the