Toshio Nishi: Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1944-1952. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1982.

 

Japan’s defeat in World War II resulted not merely in surrender, but unconditional surrender to the United States and its allies. The United States had imposed unconditional surrender on a regime enemy before—in 1865, in defeating the Confederate States of America. Both the Confederacy and the Empire of Japan suffered physical devastation during those wars. Both the Confederacy and the Empire of Japan were also required to change their regimes from oligarchy to republicanism, or to what Nishi calls “unconditional democracy,” requiring years of political ‘reconstruction.’ Once its political structure was reintegrated into the United States, the Southern states backslid, as local political elites allied with working-class whites to reinstitute social and political subordination of the freed slaves. In Japan, however, ‘regime change’ or political revolution proved far more successful. Nishi, a Hoover Institution research fellow and teacher at the Institute of Moralogy in Kahiwa, Japan, shows how the Americans brought that off.

He begins with a brief, useful overview of modern Japanese political history. From 1604 to 1867, the Tokugawa Shoguns ruled the country, maintaining an oligarch-‘feudal’ hierarchy within Japanese society. For most of that period, they kept Japan in a situation of splendid isolation from the West. By 1844, King William II of the Netherlands, that eminently commercial country, urged the Japanese to open their country to foreign trade, to avoid having it opened by force. In the 1840, British, French, and American naval commanders issued the same warning. Underestimating the military power now at the disposal of the Western countries, power afforded them by the technological advances made possible by modern-scientific experimental methods, the Shogunate refused to comply. In July 1853 U. S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, President Millard Fillmore’s special envoy, arrived with an imposing naval squadron. The Japanese regime temporized, but by the following year Perry could return home with a Treaty of Peace and Amity in hand. With American English, Russian, and Dutch access to a limited number of ports, “the treaty introduced the concept of extraterritoriality to the Japanese people”; now not only present on Japanese soil but “immune from Japanese laws,” the foreigners soon provoked “bitter resentment among the Japanese” at what they took to be a form of colonization. 

The lower-ranking Samurai rebelled, calling for a new imperial regime. Worried at the prospect of a military coup, the regime changed policy, now intending, as the rulers said, to “clear the barbarians out of the country.” A marriage between the presiding Shogun and a princess of the Imperial House “confirmed for the Japanese people the ultimate legitimacy of imperial governance.” But to make the expulsion of foreigners certain, the rebels waged civil war against the Shogunate, installing a new regime in 1868. “The new regime was named ‘Meiji’ or Enlightened Reign.” To the existing hierarchic “class structure based upon Confucian ethics,” the Meiji added modernization, understood as industrialization based on “adopting Western technological skills.” “The imperial government constructed new industrial plants and sold them to a few private merchants. Government protection, no competition, and great opportunities for expansions enabled those merchants to develop their firms into huge conglomerates, commonly called zaibatsu (literally, ‘financial cliques,’), that dominated the market through oligopoly.” Surely, the modern West must have “some vital secrets that were responsible for its superior technology.” “Various missions and many bright students were sent abroad to search them out.” Today’s readers will recognize the identical strategy in post-Maoist China. Upon returning to Japan, the young scholars brought back not only scientific knowledge but an ideological mishmash of Rousseau, British liberalism, Prussian statism, the various and contradictory economic notions of Malthus, Smith, Mill, and List, and the philosophic doctrines of modern historicism found in Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The regime frowned upon much of this, especially Western political thought. 

“Enrich the Nation! Strengthen Its Arms!” “The regime neither question nor resisted the imperialistic propensity that was inherent” in these slogans, instead “dreaming of a civilized and mighty utopia,” somehow blending Western technology with Eastern spirituality. Japan’s first prime minister, Ito Hirobumi, proclaimed bushido, the “warrior’s code,” based on what he described as “an education which aspired to the attainment of Stoic heroism, a rustic simplicity and a self-sacrificing spirit unsurpassed in Sparta, and the aesthetic culture and intellectual refinement of Athens”—none of which produced modern technology because none possessed the spirit of modern science, founded on the aspiration to conquer nature, a project imbued with neither heroism, nor rustic simplicity, nor self-sacrifice, nor aesthetic culture, nor classical philosophy. Sure enough, the Education Act of 1872, with its emphasis on vocational training and “success in life,” in many respects replaced the Confucian Analects with Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, a tract famed for its aphorism, “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” Regime control over the academic world successfully bridled those whose ‘Western learning’ had gone in politically distasteful directions.

Ideational incoherence notwithstanding, the policy worked, for a while. In 1895, Imperial Japan defeated China; ten years later, it defeated Russia. It chose the winning side in World War I. “Because of its xenophobic fascination with the West,” Imperial Japan “was extraordinarily sensitive to the military and political movements of the Western powers,” even as the Chinese regime has become, today. “This sensitivity found expression in a fervent and uncompromising nationalism; the Japanese oligarchs of the late nineteenth century had ‘rectified’ the nation’s indulgent dependence upon the West and restored the ‘real Japan,'” as militarism “began to pervade Japanese domestic and foreign policies.” After the war, the multiplying apprehensions of the Western regimes led them to sit down with the Japanese at the 1921-22 Washington Naval Conference, resulting in a naval arms limitation treaty preserving American and British superiority. This, coupled with “racist treatment of Japanese immigrants” in the United States (whose Progressive intellectuals were still under the sway of ‘race-science’ illusions), “left a lasting bitterness in the minds of the Japanese people.” “Ironically, the American treatment of Japanese immigrants matched the Japanese treatment of Koreans and Chinese people in Japan was well as in their native countries,” now dominated by Japanese military power. 

The year 1931 saw the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. Stung by the League of Nations’ condemnation of the invasion, Japan withdrew from the league, the regime feeling “that they were humiliated every time they succeeded in the very game that the West had introduced to Asia.” The military and industrial oligarchy “collectively interpreted the civility of one nation toward another as a clear sign of weakness,” and convinced themselves that “foreign policy was not a matter of diplomacy but of conspiracy.” By 1937, nearly 69 percent of the Japanese gross national product was going to military expenditures. By then, the regime had abrogated the Washington Naval Agreement. The Ministry of the Army began its statement of policy with a principle drawn not from Confucius but from Heraclitus: “War is the father of creation and the mother of culture.” Since war requires the proverbial sinews of war, “the Japanese emphasis on material wealth was an ideological necessity for nation building,” and material wealth in modernity required “a literate and skillful labor force.” Nonetheless, by the aftermath of the Great War Japan saw riots sparked by inflation in rice prices caused by crop failure and hoarding. 

Presiding over this regime was the Emperor, who “filled an important symbolic role for the new and insecure regime.” “At once the most personal and the most transcendent institution” in the country, the Emperor “became the ultimate political instrument that the imperial oligarchy used to solidify and legitimize its power” both at home and in its empire. The 1889 Imperial Constitution described the imperial line s one “unbroken for ages eternal” and the Emperor himself as “sacred and inviolable.” The three ruling bodies of the regime—the ministers of state, the military forces, and the Emperor’s Privy Council (the latter an extraconstitutional body) framed “the crucial policies of imperial Japan,” with the imperial legislature set to one side as “a vigorous debating society.” The Constitution “affirmed itself as ‘an immutable fundamental law,” and did indeed remain unchanged until its abrogation by the Allied occupiers in 1946. 

Every regime needs its myths, and Imperial Japan nourished its share. Shinto, “the Way of the Gods,” valorized deceased emperors and empresses as gods, as “the regime instituted a cult of antiquity” to go along with its cult of modernity. The gods themselves endorsed imperial rule and Japanese nationalism in a regime in which “dissent was treason” and indeed sacrilege. “Suppression of civil liberties grew so habitual that the Government stopped justifying its actions. It interpreted the public fear, silence, and acquiescense as public tranquility.” Then as now, much nonsense was thought about economic growth somehow leading to civic freedom. On the contrary, “internal solidarity had been engineered at the expense of freedom of thought and action—freedoms that might have grown, as Japanese intellectuals of both left and right had once thought, to be inherent by products of modernization and industrialization.” “Every aspect of Japanese life was now dominated by war,” under the approving gaze of the sacred Emperor.

The big war that came next ended in disaster for the Meiji regime. The political outcome proved much less disastrous than it did for Germany because, although at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference the American president, Harry Truman, gave Stalin’s Russia control over the Kurile islands, rule over the rest of the country remained in American hands, specifically those of General Douglas MacArthur. Although the Japanese rulers who stipulated provisions for freedom of speech, religion, and thought and other “fundamental human rights” may not have “fully comprehended nor accepted these provisions,” MacArthur understood them quite clearly, and set about implementing the new ruling institutions that would secure them for the Japanese people. And of course this occurred after the United States firebombed Tokyo and dropped nuclear devices on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By early September, the Emperor ordered his people “to lay down their arms and faithfully to carry out all the provisions of instrument of surrender and the general orders issued by the Japanese government,” as he in turn had been ordered to do by the United States. For their part, General MacArthur and his occupation forces would introduce “radical policies aimed at destroying everything that was even suggestive of Japanese loyalty to the ancient regime.” 

Advised by President Truman that “our relations with Japan do not rest on a contractual basis, but on an unconditional surrender,” that “your authority is supreme,” and that “you will not entertain any question on the part of the Japanese as to its scope,” MacArthur additionally, and quite sensibly, opposed any sharing of power in Japan with the Soviet regime, which had already massed troops on the 38th Parallel in Korea. Efforts to establish civilian control, or at least limitations, upon the general by the State Department proved feeble, as MacArthur’s executive powers, exercised ‘on the ground’ in Japan and not in Washington, D.C., trumped all others. When U.S. officials (quickly) saw that the Soviets were no friends of the United States, the Cold War began and MacArthur’s authority stood unchallenged. He used it to change the Japanese regime.

Immediately after the surrender documents were signed, MacArthur recalled that “Commodore Perry, ninety-two years ago,” had intended “to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade, and commerce of the world. But alas the knowledge thereby gained of Western science was forged into an instrument of oppression and human enslavement.” Now that “freedom is on the offensive, democracy on the march,” Japan would be turned toward “a simple philosophy embodying principles of right and justice and decency,” away from its odd regime combining feudalism (by which he meant oligarchy and civil religion) with modern science and a form of nationalism that despised human rights. Under this regime, the Japanese had become “not only politically illiterate but politically indifferent,” having had no serious opportunity for civic life. Under American occupation, Japan had now “become the world’s great laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of a people from totalitarian military rule and for the liberalization of government from within.” 

The experiment was daunting, as most republican regimes had arisen only after a long apprenticeship of limited self-government—typically, some form of constitutional monarchy. MacArthur had no such luxury. On the other hand, the collapse of the Meiji regime presented a novel situation: what MacArthur called a “collapse of a faith” which “left a complete vacuum morally, mentally, and physically.” But “the plight of the Japanese, MacArthur bluntly told the Japanese, was their own fault.” His fifteen-point policy aimed at filling that vacuum. “First destroy the military power. Punish war criminals. Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. decentralize the political power. Separate church from state.” He also called for Christian missionaries to establish themselves in Japan. Some 10 million Bibles were distributed, as MacArthur hoped Christianity’s “spiritual repugnance of war” would take hold among the people. Conversion rates were unimpressive, however. More effective was his use of athletics to teach rules of fairness and to redirect the strong Japanese sense of honor to a peaceful form of competition. 

These types of civil-social forms of rule were indispensable supplements to the institutional revolution. The Japanese needed to assimilate republican forms of government, learn to use them, habituate themselves to them. First among these efforts was demilitarization. He purged the government of its military men and proclaimed former prime minister and army general Tojo Hideki “Japan’s first war criminal.” Tojo gave MacArthur unwitting assistance by failing at his suicide attempt, intensifying his dishonor by using a pistol instead of the traditional samurai sword. By October 1946, after a process of screening by the Japanese government, MacArthur had removed 186,000 employees from the national government; all military personnel were barred from holding public office. He also ordered a national election for a new, and newly-empowered House of Representatives. Crucially, Japanese voters avoided candidates from the far left and the far right. By April of the following year, old-regime elements had also been purged from the local governments in time for the country’s first election of provincial and municipal executives and assemblymen. In May, Japan had its first prime minister elected by the people, the democratic socialist Katayama Tetsu. 

On the religious front, “Japanese conservatives worried that without Shinto and imperial sovereignty japan would never be strong again.” To counter this sentiment, MacArthur redoubled his efforts to sever all connection between Temple and State. “One conspicuous reason for the ferocity of GHQ’s attack on the former state religion was that the origins of the imperial system and of Shinto were virtually indistinguishable,” the emperor being “the object and primary practitioner of Shinto rituals,” combining the functions of High Priest and principal deity. MacArthur and his team described this as nothing short of “ideological tyranny so insidious and all-pervasive as to reduce to impotence all opposition, whether of individual or of ideas.” 

The first step to economic reform was equally draconian. The U.S. government initially reduced the Japanese to “a subsistence economy” in order to “accelerate the disintegration of the Japanese Empire and guarantee the future paralysis of any potential Japanese war machines” while effectively destroy socioeconomic hierarchies which supported the old regime. Consequently, “MacArthur swiftly began dissolving zaibatsu, those family-centered financial conglomerates that had played such a part in the development of Japanese business and commerce” as modern versions of feudal fiefs. To avert mass starvation, MacArthur distributed food to the Japanese; hunger took much of the remaining ‘fight’ out of them. But the Americans saw that a subsistence economy could and should not be maintained for long, concluding “that the risk of a strong, capitalistic Japan becoming a future military threat to the United States was less than that of an economically feeble Japan becoming a prey to international communist encroachment.” The newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency understood that the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek was on the brink of defeat in China, with Mao Zedong’s Communist Party poised to take over rule of the mainland. For their part, Japanese civilian leaders “understood that the United States needed Japan as much as they themselves wanted American money and security.” The two sides began to bargain.

A substantial spur to Japanese economic recovery was MacArthur’s land reform; from the American “standpoint of making every Japanese laborer a good capitalist, his land reform was brilliant policy.” Landlords were forced to turn their lands over to “those farmers who actually cultivated it.” Unlike Russia and China, Japan saw no inroads by the communists in the countryside. Since communist organizers had used peasants in other countries as a crucial element in their revolutions, this reform contributed substantially to ruining communist hopes for a ‘people’s revolution’ directed by Stalinists. 

Despite MacArthur’s efforts to present himself as a mere guide to the Japanese on “the road to democracy,” they “knew he was over and above even the emperor.” This meant that MacArthur’s long-term presence in the country could not be justified, if Japan was truly to adapt its way of life to a republican regime. For a few years, however, the militarist ethos the Meiji regime had instilled in the people worked in the Americans’ favor; the fact that MacArthur and the Americans had won and their leaders had lost valorized the Americans and dishonored the Japanese militarists. As far as many Japanese were concerned, there was no objection to starting the war, but losing it was a disgrace. It would take another generation to substitute that ethos for a commercial-republican one.

Accordingly, press freedom in postwar Japan most immediately meant freedom from old-regime propaganda, and emphatically not “destructive criticism of the Allied Powers” or “the Allied forces of occupation.” MacArthur did abrogate prewar laws and ordinances “that subjugated the press” to the Japanese government, an important move in the long run. On balance, “American democracy, no matter how one interprets it, offered far more intellectual freedom and political liberties to the Japanese people than they had ever experienced before 1945.” 

Nishi describes MacArthur’s dismissal of “the possibility of a spontaneous development of Japanese democracy” as self-righteous. It was hardly that, but rather a matter of common sense. “The Japanese leaders were more comfortable with the familiar tyranny of the oligarchic cliques than with the tyranny of the ignorant masses, which was what they imagined popular sovereignty to be.” As MacArthur therefore saw, “We could not simply encourage the growth of democracy. We had to make sure that it grew.” There was no time for Burkeanism. Accordingly, MacArthur set the Japanese to writing a new, republican constitution. When the first draft came back looking rather like a Japanese version of the Southern ‘Redeemers’ policies in post-Reconstruction America, the general rejected it. “Their skill in fashioning facades involving no structural remodeling” of the old regime institutions “was notable,” the general remarked, tartly and accurately. The Japanese wanted to continue the emperor’s anointment as a “supreme and inviolable” being. The last Meiji prime minister stated that the surrendering regime accepted the Potsdam Declaration with the proviso that the Emperor’s prerogatives would be infringed in no way, but by New Year’s Day 1946 the Emperor himself “denied his divinity.”

That was an indispensable beginning, but regime change requires the right institutional framework, not just declarations. MacArthur ordered his staff to write a constitution consistent with the regime America wanted. When “the Japanese Government finally realized that MacArthur had no interest in compromising his version of what the United States wanted—or what Japan in future should want,” the government split into supporters of the new Constitution and its enemies. The supporters prevailed, partly because MacArthur at least granted the emperor status as “the symbol of the State,” whereas other American proposals would have deprived him of even that. After Emperor Hirohito proclaimed it law, MacArthur could call it “the most important accomplishment of the Occupation,” and so it has proved to be. Aside from the desacralization of the emperor, the main features of the new constitution were elimination of kolutai, the imperial national policy; the guarantees of civil and political liberties; and Article 9, the “no-war clause.” 

Why did it work? Nishi remarks that one must not assume “that the Japanese [were] so rooted in tradition that they could hardly change their political orientation or preferences.” After all, the Meiji regime itself dated back only to 1868, less than a century before the Americans arrived, and the aspiration to modernize had gripped Japanese elites a couple of decades before that. Indeed, “the celebrated Meiji Constitution of 1889 itself was an idealized version of Prussian constitutional absolutism”—that is, an importation from the West. Moreover, “Japanese reality during the 1940s was a nightmare, the end of which encouraged a mood of idealism and risk taking in conqueror and conquered alike.” In the event, whereas “Japanese conservatives attempted to preserve the structure of imperial sovereignty” by “inject[ing] some democratic practices into it to placate domestic and foreign suspicions,” MacArthur “did the reverse,” abolishing imperial sovereignty and “inject[ing] undemocratic practices for the sake of achieving democratic ends.” MacArthur prevailed because the Japanese people had had enough of the regime of imperialist oligarchs. “The vast majority of the people welcomed the substance of the new Constitution.” 

Like all serious political founders, MacArthur understood he who rules the education system rules the country. In his own generation, American Progressives had done just that. Having framed a new constitution for Japan, “MacArthur had to teach the Japanese people how to use it in their daily lives.” Accordingly, “education in occupied Japan was fiercely political; to the U.S. government, it was the best instrument for achieving basic ideological change,” as it had been for American Progressives and indeed for the American Founders. Ergo, “no nationalism, no militarism, and no communism in Japanese education.” The need for this was urgent, because the Meiji regime had done such a thorough job of promoting its own ruling principles that “the word ‘intellectual’ in Japanese society automatically connoted ‘political.'” 

Because the Meiji had promoted what amounted to a ‘success’-based ideology, its failure prepared the Japanese to respect “the invincible Americans.” General MacArthur made no effort to dissuade them of that sentiment. He used his absolute authority “not only to improve but actually to revolutionize the Japanese way of thinking about self-government,” to “constitutionally prevent the Japanese from fighting another war in the future” by “disarm[ing] the Japanese mind.” By October 1945, military training in the schools was abolished, military officers on school staffs were removed, and plans for reeducating teachers were formed. But that was not enough, as the Japanese Minister of Education dragged his feet. “The Americas understood [his] covert intention: to keep imperial sovereignty alive” in the minds of Japanese youth. To counter his efforts, MacArthur commanded that the Japanese government “revise the content of all educational instruction ‘in harmony with representative government, international peace, the dignity of the individual, and such fundamental human rights as the freedom of assembly, speech, and religion.'” More, the educational system would become a sort of permanent ‘truth and justice commission,’ informing students, teachers and the public about “the part played by  militaristic leaders, their active collaborators, and those who by passive acquiescence committed the nation to war with the inevitable result of defeat, distress, and the present deplorable state of the Japanese people,” as one directive put it. Since “the identification of the individual with the state was one of the primary themes” in Japanese education, “serv[ing] as a powerful reinforcement for the doctrine of state supremacy,” MacArthur’s education emphasized individualism based on human rights inherent in the human person as such. As for modern science, already esteemed by the old regime, MacArthur’s educational system taught that, contrary to the militarists, “a scientific attitude…was a peaceful attitude,” one rightly regarding “Japanese mythology, folklore, and even a sense of historical continuity [to be] something shameful and tainted with defeat.”

Reforms extended to the Japanese language itself. The Japanese people had used a combination of three forms of writing: Katakana, the simplest form; hiragana, a “slightly more complex” form; and kanji, a “visibly more complicated” form. Robert King Hall, chief of the Education Section of the Planning Staff for the Occupation of Japan at  the Civil Affairs Staging Area, strongly recommended the use of the simplest form of written language in the educational system—in obvious contradiction to the spirit of aristocratic/oligarchic education embodied in kanji. After struggling to master the complexities of kanji, Hall argued, Japanese students “may lack the linguistic abilities essential to democratic citizenship,” such as reading “daily newspapers and popular magazine.” Nishi objects that Germany and Italy, Japan’s allies, had had vernacular languages for a long time, and turned to fascism anyway, this misses Hall’s point. German and Italian fascism were mass movements, ‘democratic’ and indeed demagogic. Further, to say that a vernacular or ‘democratized’ language does not necessarily result in a regime of democratic republicanism does not require one to deny that a highly complex language inclines the educated classes toward attitudes that fit an aristocratic civil society.

The Americans introduced a final, structural reform to Japanese education. Since “the interests of individual human beings were not to be subordinated to those of the state,” control of education needed to be devolved from the central government to local school boards. Americans and Japanese alike “understood well that America-initiated school boards would take away power and prestige from the central government in Tokyo.” Problems arose because many Japanese didn’t understand the process, having never governed themselves at the local level. 

By May 1946, the Japanese Ministry of Education effectively surrendered. In their Guide to New Education in Japan, they identified five defects of “Japanese outlook and character,” all deriving from the “general defects” of the “body politic and especially “in the wrong way of thinking of the people themselves.” First, they understood that “Japan is not sufficiently modernized,” by which they meant that the Japanese had “learned how to use steam engines and electrical apparatus” without “adequately learn[ing] the scientific spirt which had built these things.” Teachers must “make better use of our abilities to embrace and assimilate and take in the fundamental principles of Western Civilization, digest these principles and be able to use them as our own.” Second, “The Japanese Nation does not sufficiently respect Humanity, Character, nor Individuality”; since human beings have “free will,” each one has “a nature peculiar only to that particular person.” Education should proceed on this assumption. Related to this point and thirdly, “The Japanese lack critical spirit and are prone to obey authority blindly.” They must learn to reject “the idea that officials are better than civilians.” Fourth, “the Japanese people are scientifically backward and have a poor sense of logic.” Those who “are inclined to obey authority blindly” are also those who “did not have the ability to think logically.” To think logically, to be capable of analyzing policy proposals rationally, was the sine qua non of democratic self-government. Finally, “the democratic people are self-satisfied and narrow-minded,” taking “an arrogant and egoistic attitude toward those below them who are blindly obedient to their superiors.” Japanese racism and religious prejudice result from this unwarranted self-conceit. The May 1947 Fundamental Law on Education reinforced these policy changes, which were also regime changes.

As the Japanese people began to grow “restless with the Occupation” (“Would it never end?” they wondered), the American government recommended that MacArthur negotiate a permanent peace treaty for the Cold War era. MacArthur initially demurred, but when the Korean War began in June 1950, and the purge of communists intensified, he inched toward such a settlement, completed in 1951. The occupation itself ended the following year.

Nishi concludes that although “the Japanese people had to swallow many alien ideas and practices,” “much to their surprise…the people found these ideas and practices far from unpalatable.” “The Japanese people discovered democracy to be a pleasant, efficient, and even commercially profitable way of life.” The one remaining shadow over the new regime—which has endured nearly as long as the Meiji regime—”is best described as a craving for the aesthetic simplicity of vertical loyalty,” exploited by MacArthur, “unintentionally perpetuated” by him, and persisting as “a powerful undercurrent of indigenous emotion that runs against the tide of democracy.”

 

 

 

 

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Between Two Millstones: Book I: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978. Peter Constantine translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 56, Number 6, November/December 2019. 

 

We know Solzhenitsyn the anti-Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn the chronicler of Leninist-Stalinist mass-murder and mass-incarceration, Solzhenitsyn the prophet of Western decline, Solzhenitsyn the Russian patriot and Christian witness. Here we meet Solzhenitsyn the writer, a man searching for a quiet place to gather his thoughts, refine them, and put them on paper. Between the ruthless tyranny of the East and the clamorous democracy of the West, he will not relinquish his vocations as dissident, prophet, witness, and patriot, but he needs to find a place where he can pursue these vocations in his way, the way of an heir to the legacies of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, legacies deformed by two generations of partisan hacks. “I do not fit in with either system”; Christians seldom do, entirely, with any, and surely not with the modern ‘project,’ East or West.

The exile he sketches began with his 1974 expulsion from the Soviet Union, the first and heaviest “millstone.” Solzhenitsyn published his sketches of his life there in The Oak and the Calf, which appeared a year later. The Communist-Party oligarchs (“a pack of horned devils flitting through the early dawn before the matin bell rings”) finally chose to persecute him from afar, having vainly tried imprisonment, poisoning, blandishments, and blackmail in Russia during the previous three decades. Hosted initially by the German Nobel Prize winner and recent president of PEN, Heinrich Böll, he immediately confronted an alien species of ‘writers,’ the Western journalists, whose “persistent tracking by photo and film crews, documenting my every step and move,” amounted to “the flip side of the relentless, but secret shadowing to which I was subjected at home” by the KGB. Although their “penchant for sensationalism” “saved me” by making it too costly for the Soviet regime to silence him, fundamentally any writer needs simple peace and quiet. By refusing most interviews (“Were they to ensnare me with glory?”), Solzhenitsyn meant no offense; nonetheless, what he intended only as “a literary defense mechanism” provoked media indignation. Under regimes of doctrinaire social egalitarianism, ‘celebrity’ bestowed by the princes of mass media takes the place of grace granted by God, its refusal anathematized as similarly sinful. He couldn’t avoid the censures, but at least he avoided “the danger of becoming a blatherer,” the temptation to issue statements on every passing ‘issue’ journalists through at him. “Political passion is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower.” To put it in language even ‘we moderns’ understand, Solzhenitsyn was playing the long game—knowing that what ‘the media’ giveth ‘the media’ can take away.

Looking back on the situation from the vantage point of 1978, when he wrote Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn remained grateful to the Russian novelist and fellow émigré Anatoli Kuznetsov, who likened a writer coming to the free West from the tyrannical East to a diver suffering from the bends, “coming from a high to a low pressure zone where one ran the risk of bursting.” “How right he was!” Above all, he knew, he must “continue working steeped in silence, not allowing the flame of writing to expire, not letting myself be torn to pieces, but to remain myself.” A writer’s discipline, but also a man’s, and a citizen’s: “It was so difficult to get used to the full freedom of life and to learn the golden rule of all freedom: to use it as little as possible.”

Offered a quiet home in Norway, he and his wife reconnoitered, only to see that Soviet military forces would likely invade there first, if a European war broke out. Zurich made more sense; Lenin had lived there, before being smuggled back to Russia by the Germans as a knife aimed at the all-too-soft underbelly of the czarist regime during the Great War. Solzhenitsyn was writing his vast historical novel, The Red Wheel, early chapters of which would appear in his 1976 title, Lenin in Zurich. Residence in Switzerland would prove indispensable not only for the necessary historical research but for what every novelist needs: a sense of the place, its physical and moral atmosphere. Finally, however, he saw he could not stay. After a press conference presenting From Under the Rubble, a collection of essays critical of the Soviet regime written by himself and some fellow dissidents, the Swiss authorities notified Solzhenitsyn that in future he must request authorization to hold such a meeting from the Zurich police. He now understood why so many Soviet exiles had left Europe for America. Europe had lost it sense of civic freedom. “We had to move on.”

But not before visiting a Swiss canton during the election of its chief magistrate, the Landammann. The winning candidate gave a fine, sober speech on the need never to surrender “to the folly of total freedom” while also never “making the state almighty.” In the face of the recent abandonment of the South Vietnamese people to the Communist North, raising the question of “whether America will remain loyal to its alliance with Europe,” Europeans must remember to associate their “individual freedoms” with “our obligations and self-defense”—a suggestion that the Swiss regime of self-defense by an armed and vigilant citizenry might deter Soviet-bloc aggression more effectively than the NATO alliance. More, the Landammann continued, “There cannot be a rational functioning state without a dash of aristocratic and even monarchic elements”—without a modern version of what Aristotle calls a ‘mixed’ regime, with its balance of popular representation, administrative expertise, and executive vigor: The Swiss Confederation, “now the oldest democracy in the world,” “did not spring from the ideas of the Enlightenment” but from experience, from “the ancient forms of communal life.” “This is the kind of democracy we [Russians] could do with,” Solzhenitsyn thought—a democracy resembling their own medieval town assemblies. Self-government in political communities small enough for personal knowledge of fellow-citizens: This was the best feature of Switzerland, of old Russia, and even, he would find, some parts of modern America. It is likely that Solzhenitsyn recalled the early Christian communes, as well.

Before leaving Europe, Solzhenitsyn found himself embroiled in political controversies with Russian writers who were far from being journalists, each of whom understood democracy, and politics generally, in ways that diverged sharply from his own moral sensibilities. The first was the renowned physicist Andre Sakharov, who, very much like a man accustomed to thinking in abstractions, in formulae, criticized Solzhenitsyn for having advocated a transition period, frankly described as “authoritarian,” between the Soviet regime and a popularly-based ‘mixed’ regime. Sakharov wanted an immediate regime change from Communist oligarchy to parliamentary democracy, with no intermediate steps. For Solzhenitsyn, “the collapse of Russia in 1917 was like a fiery image before my eyes, the insane attempt at transforming our country to democracy in a single leap,” a leap into “instant chaos” that issued not in democracy but in the triumph of Lenin’s tyranny. “This thirst for ‘instant’ democracy was the impulse of the big-city desk-dwellers, who had no notion whatsoever of real people’s lives.” “In my view, democracy means the genuine self-government of the people, from the bottom up,” whereas social-democratic, scientistic and literary political commentators alike “see it as being the rule of the educated classes” who undertake to lead the people. Solzhenitsyn’s stance, however sensible, could only further irritate the journalists, who now pegged him as “a reactionary and a nationalist.” He was a sort of Christian Aristotelian, not only in his esteem for the ‘mixed regime,’ the regime Aristotle esteemed as the best practicable regime, but also in his insistence on the importance of fitting regime institutions to a given people’s way of life, its “spirit” (as Montesquieu termed it), it “culture.” A ‘liberal’ like Sakharov “was in fact related to the socialist wing…by way of the fathers of the Enlightenment.” “Russia’s moral development” couldn’t advance on abstractions generated by such unreasonable rationalism.

A writer who should have understood the importance of culture was the émigré novelist Andrei Sinyavsky, a satirist who wrote under the pen name of Abram Tertz. Sinyavksy lived in Paris, where he edited the dissident journal Syntaxas. In its inaugural issue he wrote an article blaming Russia’s agony on Russia itself. “Even the lowest criminals—men who in their mindset are practically animals—revere their mothers,” Solzhenitsyn riposted. “But not Abram Tertz.” The two men remained sharply at odds for the remainder of Sinyavsky’s life, with Sinyavsky going so far as to assert that Solzhenitsyn’s exile was a KGB ruse. Solzhenitsyn was gentler in his critique of the celebrated émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, who in a sense made the same error of “turning his back on Russia,” but not with contempt; Nabokov took a purely literary/esthetic stance, ignoring history for the cultivation of stylistic elegance. Although both a trained scientist and an accomplished novelist, Solzhenitsyn steered away from the pleasurable simplisms of both scientistic and literary politics—really anti- or a-political thought—by using political history as his intellectual ballast, keeping his mind on an even keel, provisioning himself to practice what Aristotle considered the preeminent political virtue, prudence.

It transpired that his sudden, secret departure from Switzerland foiled yet another KGB plot to murder him—forgiving and forgetting never having served as leading characteristics of the Soviet regime-ethos. Moving his family first to Canada—that “timid giant pushed aside in the onrush of the daring and the ruthless,” “immersed in a slumber of oblivion”—he finally chose residence in the United States. After visiting Alaska (“too much of a national park steeped in the nineteenth century”), the family next stopped in northern California, where an “Old Believers” Russian Orthodox community would not allow them to worship with them in the church or to eat at the same table with the adults. But his most important ‘stop’ turned out to be a two-month stay at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he delved into the vast collection of materials on the February Revolution of 1917, which preceded the Bolshevik Revolution, a year later.

Alone in the archives, “My eyes opened as to what had really taken place.” Having studied the 1917-1918 ferment for some forty years, in preparation for composing the Red Wheel, he now made crucial discoveries that “caused a shift in my thinking that I did not expect.” Previously, Solzhenitsyn had “clung to the universally accepted view that Russia in February 1917 had achieved the freedom that generations had striven for, and that all of Russia rejoiced and nurtured this freedom, but alas, alas, only for eight months, as the Bolshevik fiends drowned that freedom in blood, steering the nation to ruin.” But as he perused the documents in the Hoover collection, he say “that Russia was inescapably lost… from the very first days of March,” as a powerless Provisional Government took direction from “a narrow, closed committee in Petrograd, itself “hiding behind the many thousands of noisy members of the larger Soviet.” “A beguiling pink cloud” of leftish opinion continues to shroud what really happened, to this day. Readers of the latest volume of the Red Wheel to be published in English, March 1917, will see how Solzhenitsyn integrated these new insights into his narrative.

Although Solzhenitsyn frequently called for the institution of the rule of law in Russia, he never could accustom himself to its actual operation in the United States and in the West, generally. Facing important questions concerning translations and re-translations of his books, copyright tangles, and all the attendant difficulties, he found “the world of the Western law courts” to be “alien to me,” often because litigation was driven by calculations respecting the mass market of modern commercial democracy. Tocqueville would have understood the jarring effect of democratic egalitarianism on an aristocratic sensibility. For Tocqueville Christianity sharpens this conflict, having been revealed under aristocratic, hierarchic conditions amenable to truths delivered from ‘on high’ but being itself a teaching of equality, a revelation of the universal responsibility of all men “created equal” before God. One senses this tension in Solzhenitsyn’s soul, his life and work.

For his part, when it came to the rule of law, Solzhenitsyn would come to laud the much smaller, local law courts of medieval Russia, where litigation remained on a human scale. The “megacities” of America could offer no such justice. In the hands of a writer like Sinyavsky, all of this would be the stuff of comedy, but for Solzhenitsyn, for whom writing remained a matter of life and death—physical and spiritual—the Western legal process was a torment, reanimating in him the Christian impatience with what men like Luther and Calvin (somewhat unfairly) regarded as Old-Testament legalism. “Legal battles are a profanation of the soul, an ulceration,” Solzhenitsyn thunders. “As the world has entered a legal era, gradually replacing man’s conscience with law, the spiritual level of the world has sunk.” In the courts as in politics, “I was torn by the never-ending conflict within me: to write or to do battle?” In modest defense of Western legalism, it must be said that these battles eventually turned out well for him, as his works have appeared in good translations, with profits now going where he intended them to go—often to persecuted Soviet writers and their families. He even found a big-city lawyer he respected, the Washington insider William Bennett Williams, who assisted in the liberation of Russian dissident Aleksandr Ginzburg from a Soviet prison.

A friend found him a suitable property in rural Cavendish, Vermont, where he built a house for his family. His new home proved his refuge from modernity’s pressures, a place where he could think and write. Initially, his new neighbors took offense at the fence he built around his property, but he followed the smart suggestion of Governor Richard Snelling, who advised him to explain himself at the next town meeting. He not only explained his family’s unique security needs, but he took the opportunity to explain the difference between the words ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet,’ the former being to the latter “as ‘man’ is to ‘disease.'” “Immediately, the tension in the town eased, and a staunch neighborliness was established,” reaffirming Solzhenitsyn’s esteem for the personal touch of small-town life. He nonetheless continued to long for return to his own country, rightly anticipating that it would happen someday.

After making peace with his neighbors in early 1977, Solzhenitsyn’s life settled into a sort of routine. He spent most of his time gratefully at work on the Red Wheel, a work that “encompasses all of Russia—Russia in flux.” It was crucially important to write it all down, to look back, to understand and assess a time when “many people could not see what was coming upon them, not even a day ahead.” If Russians were to have even a slight chance of fostering a decent life for themselves in the future, they needed a reliable account of the errors of the past, the malice of those who exploited those errors, and the rare heroes who saw clearly and acted with acumen and justice. They needed a civic education to prepare their souls for the practice of self-government. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn also needed to tend to his reputation among Russians, not for reasons of petty vanity but because he needed to be trusted as a reliable witness and researcher, a truth-teller—precisely because he had indispensable moral-political and spiritual truths to tell them.

Unfortunately, many of his fellow exiles and dissidents distrusted him. They didn’t know him personally, but there was more: “In truth we had sprung from different roots, expressed different aspirations, and had almost nothing in common but the time and place of action.” Most of Solzhenitsyn’s cohorts were secularized, urban intellectuals who “remained unresponsive to the plight of the Russian countryside and especially to the renewed persecution of the Orthodox Church.” While many of the dissidents “took advantage of every person’s natural right to leave a place they do not want to live” (emphasis added), they turned their backs on the Russians, and the Russia, they left behind. They eschewed Russia as a place for Christians, and for the Orthodox Christianity that Solzhenitsyn never ceased considering the highest form of Christianity, even if his was a ‘genial orthodoxy,’ esteeming all decent forms of worship as bulwarks against atheism. Not for the new generation of exiles was the prayer Solzhenitsyn composed and recited with his sons in Vermont: “Grant us, O Lord, to live in health and strength, our minds bright, until the day when you will open our path home to Russia, to labor and to sacrifice ourselves so that she may recover and flourish.”

The dissident exiles found a sympathetic audience among the similarly secularized intellectuals in the West, who welcomed them, “offered financial support, and heaped [them] with praise.” Solzhenitsyn, however, offended American secularists with his Harvard commencement address in 1978. “For thirty years in the USSR, and for four years now in the West, I kept slashing and hacking away at Communism, but in these last years I had also seen much in the West that was alarmingly dangerous, and here I preferred to talk about that.” At Harvard he publicized his dissatisfaction with Western legalism, a standard “far lower than the true moral yardstick”; he criticized the mis-definition of freedom as “unbridled passion” and its consequence, the weakening of “a sense of responsibility before God and society.” It is well to speak of human rights, he observed, but more urgent to speak of human obligations; few in the West of 1978 were. He judged the likely consequences to be harsh. “The reigning ideology, that prosperity and the accumulation of material riches are to be valued above all else, is leading to a weakening of character in the West, and also to a massive decline in courage and the will to defend itself, as was clearly seen in the Vietnam War, not to mention a perplexity in the face of terror”—that is, the increasing acts of terrorism committed by Muslim militants against Western people. Most deeply, and perhaps most gratingly to his critics, Solzhenitsyn traced all of this to Enlightenment “rationalist humanism,” the “notion that man is the center of all that exists, and that there is no Higher Power above him.” In this “irreligious humanism” the democratic West and the oligarchic East join hands. “The moral poverty of the twentieth century comes from too much having been invested in sociopolitical changes, with the loss of the Whole and the High.” To lose the Whole and the High is to divest oneself of riches greater than those won by capitalists or promised by socialists.

It is almost needless to say that such criticisms found few sympathetic echoes. “It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. When I called out ‘live not by lies!’ in the Soviet Union, that was fair enough, but when I called out ‘live not by lies!’ in the United States, I was told to go take a hike.” All the more reason to write, “When I return home to Russia one day, I am certain that everything will fall back into place; it is for that moment that I live and write.”

This first volume of Between Two Millstones ends with Solzhenitsyn’s account of his struggle to vindicate his reputation against KGB slanderers, one a former friend from childhood. Physical and spiritual exile from Soviet Russia and spiritual exile from the West were the exactions Providence inflicted on the writer who took up the task of prophetic witness against the world of his time.

In this book above all others, perhaps, Solzhenitsyn shows how he subtly shifted the emphasis of Russian Orthodox Christianity toward a path of greater sobriety. Just as Roman Catholic Christianity brings Aristotelian philosophy in as a supplement to Christian spirituality, thereby fulfilling the Christian command to strive for the prudence of serpents along with the innocence of doves, Orthodox Christianity brings in Platonic philosophy. Rightly understood, Platonic philosophy equally commends prudential reasoning on moral and political matters. (Hence the term political philosophy.) But Orthodox Christians thinkers too often avail themselves not so much of Platonism but of Neoplatonism, with its impatience for undertaking a spiritual and intellectual ascent beyond the conventions, the traditions, of the Christian’s immediate ‘worldly’ surroundings. It’s a bit too easy to be a saint in a desert; the Apostles set out to talk with their fellow-subjects in Imperial Rome, seeking to persuade them, not to leave them behind. In lauding and, more tellingly, practicing the life of moderation or self-limitation, strict justice, unshakable courage, and practical wisdom, in partnering with his wife to hold their family together, and in looking to the founding of a ‘mixed’ and balanced regime that respects long-settled ways of life  including local self-government and work on the land, and in always intending to return to his own people, his own beloved country, Solzhenitsyn faithfully upheld his very Aristotelian and Christian agapic witness “between two millstones.” He hoped that someday Russians themselves would uphold that witness, take up its sacrificial burdens but also its true honor.

Charlotte Brontë: Villette. London: The Gresham Publishing Company, n.d.

 

Clear-sighted, cold-on-the-surface Lucy Snowe, English through-and-through, finds herself in the French-speaking town of Villette, where she has gone to seek gainful employment. There, she fights a civil-social continuation of the Napoleon Wars, nearly four decades after the Battle of Waterloo—themselves a continuation of what one Frenchman in the novel calls “the eternal conflict between France and England.” Villette is located in the country of “Labassecour,” usually understood as a fictionalized stand-in for Belgium, where Brontë herself worked as a teacher for several years in the French quarter of Brussels. In French, “Labassecour” means a poultry-yard, perhaps reflecting the author’s dim view of its inhabitants. More fancifully, to put one’s coeur, one’s heart, à bas means to lower it, to subordinate it, and this Lucy does, with true English self-rule.

She needs the work. She spent part of her youth at the home of her widowed godmother, “a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton,” a town possibly named after an ancestor of her godmother’s late husband, a physician whose people evidently came to the British Isles from ‘France,’ specifically Brittainy. As a child, Miss Snowe had visited “about twice a year”; she begins the story she narrates with her last visit, at the age of fourteen. Her godmother’s son, John Graham Bretton, lives there—a “handsome, faithless-looking youth of sixteen,” “spoiled and whimsical”— and they are soon joined by six-year-old Paulina Home, the daughter of a “giddy, careless woman and a “sensitive,” introverted scientist. The mother has died and the father has gone away on a restorative trip. Polly prays for her father with a “monomaniac tendency,” but when it becomes clear that her father’s absence will be extended, she attaches herself to Graham, perhaps a bit to Lucy’s jealous discomfiture. “The league of acquaintanceship thus struck up was not hastily dissolved; on the contrary, it appeared that time and circumstances served rather to cement than loosen it. Ill-assimilated as the two were in age, sex, pursuits, etc. they somehow found a great deal to say to each other”—he, teasing and teaching her, she fussing over him. “With curious readiness did she adapt herself to such themes as interested him. One would have thought the child had no mind or life of her own, but necessarily live, move, and have her being in another; now that her father was taken from her, she nestled in Graham, and seemed to feel by his feeling: to exist in his existence.” Since Graham liked to read, “she proved a ready scholar,” reading Bible stories to him, sympathizing with the people in them, and often turning from them to her favorite topic, Graham. Jacob’s love for his son, Joseph, finds its parallel in her love for him; “if you were to die,” she tells him, “I should refuse to be comforted, and go down into the grave to you mourning,'” as Jacob did to Joseph’s grave. When her father eventually summons her to a new life in France she is heartbroken, “trembling like a leaf when she took leave, but exercising self-command.”

Lucy leaves, too, a few weeks later, returning home to her family. Eight years later, a series of unspecified “troubles”—they must include the death of her parents—left her with “no possibility of dependence on others: to myself alone could I look”; “self-reliance and exertion were forced upon me by circumstances, as they are upon thousands besides.” With that last phrase, she takes care to bridle pity for herself, either from her reader or in her own soul. The effort will prove characteristic of herself, as it seems to have been for the English in her time, and not only in her time.

She finds her first employment as the caretaker and companion of an old maid, who still pines over the fiancé who died in a riding accident, thirty years earlier. (On her deathbed she admits, “I still think of Frank more than of God.”) Readers never hear of her again, but her loss foreshadows the theme of lost and unconsummated love that pervades the novel.

Unemployed again, now aged 23, Lucy determines to try her fortune on the continent, for which she departs without knowing where she will find a job. On the boat to Labassecour she meets a young English lady who is going to school in Villette. Silly and a bit snobbish, Ginevra Fanshawe “tormented me with an unsparing selfishness” and her “entire incapacity to endure” the rolling sea. By contrast, Lucy is the one passenger who can remain on deck throughout the afternoon, upholding England’s honor as a maritime power. But Ginevra does one useful thing, telling her that a Madame Beck, who runs a girls’ school in Villette, is looking for “an English gouvernante.” 

Modeste Maria Beck turns out to be “a charitable woman” who, Lucy takes care to recall, “did a great deal of good.” However, the turnover among her employees is sobering. It transpires that charitable Mme. Beck rules her establishment by careful surveillance of her staff and students, “glid[ing] ghost-like through the house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through every key-hole, listening behind every door.” “While devoid of sympathy, she had a sufficiency of rational benevolence”; very French, she loved ‘the poor’ as a class, as an abstraction, without loving anyone, rich or poor, as a person. The key to heart wasn’t sympathy but self-interest. She reserves her love for herself and her own, particularly her own children, whom she cares for by meeting their every physical need without wasting an ounce of affection. She surveils them as well. In all, she’s a sort of Comtian without Comte’s theories, combining in her soul the qualifications for “a first minister and a superintendent of police,” combined. “Wise, firm faithless, secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate—withal perfectly decorous,” she quickly sees that Lucy will make a good teacher and wastes no time putting her to that service.

Gazing at her first class, Lucy “beheld opposite to me a row of eyes and brows that threatened stormy weather” in their own way worse than the English Channel waves—eyes “full of an insolent light, and brows hard and unblushing as marble. The continental ‘female’ is quite a different being to the insular ‘female’ of the same age and class.” Knowing that “madame would at any time throw overboard a professeur or maîtresse who became unpopular with the school” (like many a private-school administrator before and since, Madame knows where her bread is buttered) they expected “an easy victory” over the newcomer. Lucy subordinates the ringleader, “a young baronne” named Mademoiselle de Melcy, by reading her “stupid” composition aloud in front of the class and then tearing it in two. She is still more severe with the one remaining rebel, a girl with “a dark, mutinous, sinister eye,” whom she pushes into a closet and locks the door behind. It transpires that the girl was disliked by the other students, so this display of force enhances rather than diminishes Miss Snowe’s esteem among the students. Mme. Beck, who as a matter of course has been surveilling the classroom all along, pronounces, “C’est bien” when Lucy emerges from the classroom. From then on, her authority is secure; the reasonable but blunt English way of ruling has prevailed over the French revolutionaries, with the approval of the chief surveiller. 

“Villette is a cosmopolitan city, and in this school were girls of almost every European nation, and likewise of very varied rank in life”—the right place to study comparative politics, one might say.” “Equality is much practiced in Labassecour; though not republican in form, it is nearly so in substance,” as indeed France was in 1853, when Brontë published her book, under Napoleon III.  (A few years later, Tocqueville would publish his book on the French Revolution, maintaining that civil-social equality had prevailed in France since before the French Revolution, thriving under various forms of monarchism and republicanism alike.) “At the desks of Madame Beck’s establishment the young countess and the young bourgeoise sat side by side”; differentiated only by their manners—often “franker and more courteous” among the bourgeoises, with the aristocrats displaying “a delicately balanced combination of insolence and deceit.” As for the citizens of Labassecour, they “had an hypocrisy of their own,” but “of a such coarse order, such as could deceive few.” Among all, when a lie was judged necessary, “they brought it out with a careless ease and breadth altogether untroubled by the rebuke of conscience.”

As before, Lucy determines as she considers her students, “I must look only to myself” for support in “bring[ing] this stiff-necked tribe under permanent influence.” They “were not to be driven by force” as a general policy. “They were to be humored, borne with very patiently: a courteous though sedate manner impressed them; a very rare flash of raillery did good. Severe or continuous mental application they could not or would not, bear: heavy demand on the memory, the reason, the attention, they rejected point-blank.” English steadfastness was not a resource a teacher could mine in them, but it would serve the teacher very well. “They would riot for three additional lines to a lesson; but I never knew them rebel against a wound given to their self-respect; the little they had of that quality was trained to be crushed, and it rather liked the pressure of a firm heel than otherwise.” Egalitarian, then, but also apt subjects of despotism: Just as Tocqueville would say.

The reason Ginevra Fanshawe knew about the open position at the school turns out to have been simple: She is a student there. She has two suitors in her thrall, one whom she’s nicknamed “Isidore” (perhaps after the scholarly St. Isidore of Seville) who idealizes her and buys her things, much to her amusement (“he really thinks I am sensible”). But “he is only bourgeois.” “My present business is to enjoy youth and not to think of fettering myself, by promise or vow, to this man or that.” She prefers the attentions of “Le Colonel Alfred de Hamal,” an aristocrat. “À bas les grandes passions et les sévères vertus!” Lucy, then, isn’t the only one who knows how to discipline her passions, to say to them, “À bas,” although Ginevra unfortunately disciplines her virtues as well, all in service of a self-conscious superficiality, a way of life consisting of light pleasures. In her own way, she is an English girl who out-Frenches the French. 

When one of Mme. Beck’s daughters takes sick, she summons a “Dr. John,” who disappoints Madame by failing to take any interest in her. Initially, Lucy suspects him of carrying on an affair with Rosine Muton, “an unprincipled though pretty little French grisette”—a working-class girl, beneath even Dr. John’s professional but lamentably unaristocratic station in life. Lucy gets caught up in these romantic intrigues, and she soon learns that Mademoiselle Muton is not the object of Dr. John’s affections; Ginevra Fanshaw is, and he is her less-than-respected “Isidore.”

Before giving an account of this discovery, Lucy remarks on another regime difference between herself and the Labassecourians. They worry about her Protestantism, and she is less than impressed with their Catholicism. “One night a thunder-storm broke; a sort of hurricane shook us in our beds; the Catholics rose in panic and prayed to their saints. As for me, the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was roughly roused and obliged to live.” There could hardly be a terser description of the contrast between French and English characters. And beyond this, the school, once a convent, comes with its own “ghost story,” a “vague tale” about a nun of “the drear middle ages” who had been “buried alive, for some sin against her vow.” Lucy considers it all “romantic rubbish,” another instance of Catholic superstition. Catholicism pervades the regime of the school, “a strange, frolicsome, noisy little world,” where “great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers”—exactly the observation Rousseau makes about civil society generally, but which Lucy rather thinks more descriptive of Catholic society especially. “A subtle Romanism pervaded every arrangement: large sensual indulgence (so to speak) was permitted by way of counterpoise to jealous spiritual restrain. Each mind was being reared in slavery; but, to prevent reflection from dwelling on this fact, every pretext for physical recreation was seized and made the most of. There, as elsewhere, the CHURCH strove to bring up her children robust in body, feeble in soul, fat, ruddy, hale, joyous, ignorant, unthinking, unquestioning”—as much as saying, “Look after your bodies; leave your souls to me.” “A bargain in which every true Catholic deems himself a gainer,” Lucy ripostes; “Lucifer just offers the same terms.”

To confirm the point of this harangue, Lucy offers the spectacle of the annual fête in honor of Mme. Beck, the highlight of which is to be a play directed by M. Paul Emanuel, the “pungent and austere” professor of literature, a man of harsh, “irritable nature.” He lowers himself to beg Lucy for help when one of the girls takes ill a few hours before the play is to go on; “I apply to an Englishwoman to rescue me,” he says through gritted teeth, half to her and half to himself. Playing the role of a foppish man courting a silly flirt in the person of the typecast Miss Fanshawe, she notices that the girl is making eyes at Dr. John, who is in the audience. This goads Lucy to imitate what she sees to be his longing, “rival[ing] and out-rival[ing] him” for attention. “I acted as if wishful and resolute to win and conquer.” Although taking the part “to please another,” she finally “acted to please myself.” Upon reflection, and with a bow to a lesson taught by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, “I quite disapproved of these amateur performances.” In this instance it revealed “a keen relish for dramatic expression” in her nature, which “would not do for a mere looker-on at life; the strength and longing must be put by; and I put them by, and fastened them in with the lock of a resolution which neither Time nor Temptation has since picked.” À bas….

At the ball following the play, Ginevra’s flirtations are interrupted by jealous Madame, who, “like a little Bonaparte,” drags Dr. John away from her and to the invited parents. The girl takes out her frustration on Lucy, explaining at some length how much better-born, wealthier, accomplished, prettier, desired, and happier she is, compared to her loveless, unloved teacher. The suggestion that she is vain rolls off, but she does reveal what Lucy wants her to confirm, that Dr. John is the same as ‘Isidore.’ In conversation with the hapless physician, she learns that he imagines her “a simple, innocent, girlish fairy,” indeed a “graceful angel.” She mocks him by praising his rival, Colonel de Hamal (whom she called a monkey to Miss Fanshawe) as a “sweet seraph,” then leaves him to her illusions.

The school’s next major event is public examination day, two months after the fête. Once again, “the fiery and grasping little man” Paul Emanuel takes charge, and once again needs the Englishwoman to conduct the English exam, the one topic he “could not manage.” She softens his ire when she offers to give no examination on that topic at all. “A constant crusade against the ‘amour-propre’ of every human being, but himself, was the crotchet of this able, but fiery and grasping, little man”; in this, he bears some resemblance to Rousseau. Does he begin to love this English Sophie?

September vacation arrives, and a nightmare about her dead family, “who had loved me well in life” but now “met me elsewhere, alienated,” galls her “inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future”; “quite unendurable was the pitiless and haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown terrors,” terrors she has “suffered with a troubled mind” from the time of her youth. Severed from the love of her family members in this life, perhaps frightened that her current life might meet with their disapproval, and therefore rejection, severance from love in the afterlife, and without any known prospects for love in the future (given Graham’s distraction by Ginevra), in desperation she enters a Catholic Church and its confessional. She disrupts the priest’s routine by confessing, “Mon père, je suis Protestante.” He asks her to come not to the church but to his house, tomorrow, a proposal she would have as soon done as to walk “into a Babylonish furnace.” Why? “That priest had arms which could influence me; he was naturally kind with a sentimental French kindness, to whose softness I knew myself not wholly impervious.” Had she acceded to his invitation, “I might just now, instead of writing this heretic narrative, be counting my beads in the cell of a certain Carmelite convent on the Boulevard of Crecy in Villette.” It was enough that the priest “was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good.”

On the way back to her room she faints. A watchful person, whom she later guesses was the priest, delivers her to Dr. John’s house. She now tells her readers that Dr. John is in fact Graham Bretton, who has followed in his father’s professional footsteps. He still lives with his mother. After more than a week of bed rest she comes down to the sitting room. “How pleasant it was in its air of perfect domestic comfort!” And “to render the picture perfect, tea stood ready on the table—an English tea, whereof the whole shining service glanced at me familiarly,” not only because it is in the English style but because it is the service she remembers from the Bretton’s home in England. One might say that her recovery from an excess of Frenchness requires a dose of Englishness, perhaps a greater contribution to her recovery than Dr. John’s medical care. That night, “When I said my prayers, and when I was undressed and laid down, I felt that I still had friends.” Characteristically, she calls upon “Reason” to moderate her “importunate gratitude” for having recovered them. And she defends her self-rule. “These struggles with the natural character, the strong native bent of the heart, may seem futile and fruitless, but in the end they do good,” making “the general tenor of life… to be better regulated, more equable, quieter on the surface; and it is on the surface only the common gaze will fall. As to what lies below, leave that with God.” A regime like Mme. Beck’s, a regime like that of France, may surveil; show God “the secrets of the spirit He gave” and “ask Him how you are to bear the pains He has appointed,” for “patience in extreme need.” God’s time isn’t human time: “The cycle of one departure and return may clasp unnumbered generations; and departure and return may clasp unnumbered generations; and dust, kindling to brief suffering life, and, through pain, passing back to dust, may meanwhile perish out of memory again, and yet again.” This is indeed a Protestant answer both to ‘Hobbesian’ fear of death and the response to it fashioned in Catholic Church ritual.

Dr. John persists in his illusions about Miss Fanshawe until he, his mother, and Lucy encounter her at a concert, accompanied by another young lady aristocrat. When Ginevra snubs both the doctor and his mother, he draws the line. “I never saw her ridiculed before.” He confides to Lucy, “As [Ginevra] passed me tonight, triumphant, in beauty, my emotions did her homage; but for one luckless sneer, I should yet be the humblest of her servants”; “she could not in ten years have done what, in a moment, she has done through my mother.” How does my mother seem to you? he asks Lucy. “As she always does—an English, middle-class gentlewoman; well, though gravely dressed, habitually independent of pretense, constitutionally composed and cheerful.” Exactly so, Dr. John agrees: “The merry may laugh with mamma, but the weak only will laugh at her; she shall not be ridiculed with my consent at least, nor without my—my scorn—my antipathy.” And that is that.

But this doesn’t mean that Dr. John turn his attentions to her. School re-starts; Graham promises to write. But “Reason” forbids her to reveal her feelings for him, to him. “This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope: she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken-down.” For me, Reason “was always as envenomed as a step-mother.” “If I have obeyed her it has been chiefly with the obedience of fear, not of love”; Lucy is no philosopher. “Long ago I should have died of her ill-usage, her stint, her chill, her barren board, her icy bed, her savage, ceaseless blows, but for that Kinder Power who hold my secret and sworn allegiance,” “a spirit softer and better than human Reason.” It is in that kind of love, agapic love, that “divine, compassionate, succourable influence” that she finds solace for the lovelessness she has found in the world. In the event, Dr. John does write, and Lucy discerns that his “blithe genial language” was intended “not merely to content me” but also “to gratify himself.” The fact that he writes her because he wants to gives Lucy a moment that “had no pain, no blot, no want; full, pure, perfect, it deeply blessed me,” and she will forgive him for turning from her once again “for the sake of that one dear remembered good!” 

While reading the letter, a figure resembling the ghostly nun appears to her. In their next conversation, Dr. John will explain it away as an illusion “resulting from long-continued mental conflict.” When he prescribes happiness as the cure and a “cheerful mind” as the preventive,” Lucy quite rightly rejoins that “happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mold and tilled with manure,” but a blessing. In effect taking that rebuke to heart, at least in part, he invites to his home every week, “to keep away the nun,” as he puts it with his characteristic kind jocularity. “He regarded me scientifically in the light of a patient, and at once exercised his professional skill, and gratified his natural benevolence, by a course of cordial and attentive treatment.” It is a response unlikely to satisfy a woman. He is not unthoughtful. On the contrary, “Dr. John could think, and think well, but he was rather a man of action than of thought; he could feel, and feel vividly in his way, but his heart had no chord for enthusiasm: to bright, soft, sweet influences his eyes and lips gave bright, soft, sweet welcome, beautiful to see as dyes of rose and silver, pearl and purple, imbuing summer clouds.” But as for the other half of Burke’s dichotomy, the sublime as distinguished from the beautiful, “what belonged to storm, what was wild and intense, dangerous, sudden and flaming,” for that “he had no sympathy, and held with it no communion.” This “cool young Briton” looked down on the sublime as “the pale cliffs of his own England” look down on the tides of the Channel. It is Lucy, for all her superficial coldness, who responds to the sublime, to the Biblical more than to the classical. In this she is closer to Dostoevsky than to Jane Austen, despite her Englishness. Unlike Austen or Austen’s heroines, unlike Dr. John, for her Reason is a heavy bridle, a yoke, a burden only assuaged by the divine, agapic love which, regardless of the comfort it offers, issues from the supremely sublime God of the Bible.

A man of moderation, a ‘classical’ man, Dr. John can act decisively in response to the sublime when it appears, quite literally sudden and flaming. A fire breaks out in the theater: “Reader, I can see him yet, with his look of comely courage and cordial calm” while most of the crowd panicked and began to stampede. He sees one woman “braver than some men”; he helps her guardian rescue her from being trampled by terrified crowd. The girl turns out to be a Miss Bassompierre, formerly known as Paulina Home; her father recently inherited the estate of his late mother, a French aristocrat, along with the aristocratic ‘de’ that comes with the family fortune. Miss Fanshawe is quite beside herself with jealousy, inasmuch as Dr. John and his mother strike up a social connection with father and daughter, in the aftermath of the emergency. As Paulina tells Lucy, the Graham she knew at Bretton was smaller and wasn’t yet shaving, “yet he is Graham, just as I am little Polly, or you are Lucy Snowe.” This sense of the continuity of individual identity over time exactly fits Lucy’s mindset: “I thought the same,” namely, that “the child of seven was in the girl of seventeen,” “but I wondered to find my thoughts hers: there are certain things in which we so rarely met with our double that it seems a miracle when that chance befalls.” Paulina is indeed her double in another sense, as she will soon take the place at Dr. John’s side that Lucy had wished for herself. Lucy watches as their intimacy in conversation grows: “There are certain natures of which the mutual influence is such that the more they say the more they have to say. For these, out of association grows adhesion, and out of adhesion, amalgamation.” There is of course nothing for her to do, and she returns to the school. “Though stoical, I was not quite a stoic; drops streamed fast on my hands, on my desk I wept one sultry shower, heavy and brief. But soon I said to myself, The Hope I am bemoaning suffered and made me suffer much: it did not die till it was full time: following an agony so lingering, death ought to be welcome. Welcome I endeavored to make it. Indeed, long pain had made patience a habit.” She puts Dr. John’s letters away, in a hole in an old pear tree on the school grounds. “I was not only going to hide a treasure” (Mme. Beck has been reading them, and showing them to M. Emanuel); “I meant to bury a grief. If lie be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.” 

She continues her friendship with Paulina, who has been pestered by jealous cousin Ginevra, who brags about her admirers and denigrates Dr. John while claiming to have him as her admirer. “She is insolent; and I believe, false,” Paulina tells her. Lucy knows this to be true, but they agree to test his feelings at a dinner party.

Meanwhile, Ginevra’s falseness stems from her inability to see the difference between nature and convention. “Who are you, Miss Snowe?” she asks, not understanding how a woman who was first hired as a nursery-governess now enjoys the respect of Mme. Beck and the company of the young Countess de Bassompierre. She means “who” in the sense of social status; “her incapacity to conceive how any person not bolstered up by birth or wealth, not supported by some consciousness of name or connection, could maintain an attitude of reasonable integrity.” There is some sense in this, “the world’s wisdom,” as “an accumulation of small defenses” in the form of conventional respectability can serve as a “safeguard from debasement”; human beings are social animals, after all. Ginevra’s error consists in taking this too far, in overlooking the natural character of both the sanguine Dr. John and self-reflective, often melancholy Lucy. The courtship between Dr. John and Paulina proceeds, quite apart from Miss Fanshawe’s verbal sniping when, at the party, he approaches Paulina, not Ginevra. (Ginevra will recover from her disappointment, soon enough; later on, she will elope with Colonel de Hamal, shallow calling to shallow.)

There is another courtship going on, an unexpected one between Lucy and Paul Emanuel. As both these souls tend toward the sublime, not the beautiful, this one cannot go smoothly: “Never was a better little man, in some points, then M. Paul: never in others, a more waspish little despot,” by turns Corneille and Napoleon. Gradually, even torturously, he gains in her esteem. At a holiday ceremony at the local college she listens as he gives the featured speech. “The collegians he addressed, not as school-boys, but as future citizens and embryo patriots. With all his fire he was severe and sensible: he trampled Utopian theories under his heel; he rejected wild reams with scorn—but, when he looked in the face of tyranny—oh, then there opened a light in his eye worth seeing; and when he spoke of injustice, his voice gave no uncertain sound, but reminded me rather of the band-trumpet, ringing at twilight from the park.” Not all, “but some of the college youth caught fire”—that image of the sublime—as “he eloquently told them what should be their path and endeavor in their country’s and in Europe’s future.” In a later conversation, he tells her he wishes her to be “mon ami.” Here again, the difference between France and England appears. She agrees to call him “my friend,” a word with a less intimate connotation than the French “ami.” He doesn’t know that, and he rewards her with a previously unexampled “smile of pleasure, or content, or kindness.” His “visage changed as from a mask to a face.” Diplomatic relations have been established, indeed a human one. He will continue to call her “une Anglaise terrible,” but in a more playful manner than before. They begin to know and understand one another, although not without what increasingly look like lover’s quarrels. Whereas the courtship of Dr. John and Paulina proceeds beautifully, by proper stages, the sublime courtship of M. Paul and Lucy begins, proceeds, and culminates in storm.

For example, the time for M. Paul’s annual fête arrives, the counterpart of the one for Mme. Beck. Almost predictably, Monsieur will deliver the keynote address on his own day of honor. From the podium, baits her, and plays to the crowd, with an attack on “les Anglaises”—their “minds, morals, manners, [and] personal appearance,” and more specifically “their tall stature, their long necks, their thin arms, their slovenly dress, their pedantic education, their impious skepticism”—quite the charge, Miss Snowe evidently thinks, coming from a countryman of Voltaire—their “insufferable pride, their pretentious virtue.” “For some time the abuse of England and the English found and left me stolid.” But after fifteen minutes or so “this hissing cockatrice” began to abuse “not only our women, but our greatest names and best men; sullying the shield of Britannia, and dabbling the union-jack in mud.” All to the amusement of the girls, “for it is curious to discover how these clowns of Labassecour secretly hate England.” Out of patience, she matches his French patriotism with her English, in French: “Vive l’Angleterre, l’Histoire et les Héros! À bas la France, la Fiction et les Faquins!” Against French myths and indeed lies, English history; against French scoundrels, English heroes. Having achieved his purpose of drawing her out, he rewards her with a smirk, infuriating her still further. But back in her room, her rage subsided, she “smiled at the whole scene.” Things are getting to the point where she can’t stay angry with him for long. “I was losing the early impulse to recoil from M. Paul,” and as for himself, he later meets her in a manner “both indulgent and good-natured.” True, “he had points of resemblance to Napoleon Bonaparte,” with his “shameless disregard of magnanimity”; “he would have exiled fifty Madame de Staëls, if they had annoyed, offended, outrivaled, or opposed him,” but Lucy has begun to learn how to negotiate the sharp rocks of his shoreline, without quite being able to overcome his imperial libido dominandi. She does not yet clearly see that M. Paul, a master classroom teacher, delights in testing, in this case testing her loyalty to her country. (And not without reason: How much can one trust a person who despises his own country?) She has passed. 

Lucy is about to discover what drives this odd little man. This becomes possible because she has more the temperament of a research professor than that of a teacher. (As for M. Paul, he “was not a man to write books.”) Alone in the garden of the school, she begins her discoveries with introspection, a quest for self-knowledge few of the other persons she has encountered trouble themselves to undertake. “Courage, Lucy Snowe!” she tells herself. “With self-denial and economy now, and steady exertion by-and-by, an object in life need not fail you.” For now, “labor for independence until you have proved, by winning that prize, your right to look higher.” For now, an émigré among unfriendly foreigners, “is there nothing more for me in life—no true home—nothing to be dearer to me than myself? Nothing, at whose feet I can willingly lay down the whole burden of human egotism, and gloriously take up the nobler charge of laboring and living for others?” Perhaps not: “for you the crescent-phase must suffice,” and so it is with “a huge mass of my fellow creatures in no better circumstances,” and “I find no reason why I should be of the few favored.” Since “this life is not all, neither the beginning nor the end,” I shall continue “to believe while I tremble” and “trust while I weep.” And she concludes with a blessing: “Good-night, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful; but you are not mine. Good-night, and God bless you!”

Enter M. Paul, who interrupts her musings. He explains that, like Mme. Beck, he has been surveilling her, along with everyone else in the school, for months, from his apartment window with the aid of a looking-glass. “My book is this garden; its contents are human nature—female human nature.” He dismisses her objections to his spying as mere Protestantism, remarking that his tutor was a Jesuit, who would make no objection at all to what Lucy calls his “discoveries made by stealth.” He tells her he never once would “trouble my head about my dignity,” being a more modest man that she has supposed. In his observations, he too has seen the apparition of the nun, and together, that night, they see it again.

Whatever his methods of discovery, his discoveries favor her. A few weeks later, at a school picnic in the country where he leads the group in prayer, he allows that the two of them “worship the same God, in the same spirit, though by different rites.” This is something, not only a gesture of religious toleration but a self-revelation, and Lucy appreciates what he’s revealed. “Most of M. Emanuel’s brother professors were emancipated free-thinkers, infidels, atheists; and many of them men whose lives would not bear scrutiny: he was more like a knight of old, religious in his way, and of spotless fame,” his “vivid passions” and “keen feelings” kept in check, for the most part, by “his pure honor and his artless piety.” They read Corneille together, and he found in it “beauties I never could be brought to perceive”—the beauties of French neo-classicism, of Christianity and Aristotelianism combined. Be that as it may, she begins to perceive the beauties of Corneille in him.

He continues to test her. If you were my sister, would you “always be content to stay with a brother” such as I? Yes, she answers. But would she would remember him if he voyaged overseas? “Monsieur, how could I live in the interval?” she answers, with a touch of defensive ambiguity, leaving her sincerity open to affirmation or to doubt. “Pourtant j’ai été pour vous bien dur, bien exigeant”—yet I was for you very hard, very demanding. She hides her face behind the volume of noble Corneille, as tears cover her face. She has passed his love-test, and for the rest of the day he treats her with a gentleness that “went somehow to my heart.” Still on guard, she “would rather he had been abrupt, whimsical, and irate as was his wont.” She doesn’t like being vulnerable, a disposition her experiences have engrained in her.

She does well to be on guard. On an errand into town for Mme. Beck, she begins to see the design behind all the surveillance, the truth of M. Paul. She learns that Mme. Beck and M. Paul both know the priest, Père Silas, the one to whom she had confessed and who had delivered her to Dr. John on the night of her breakdown. She learns from the priest that M. Paul, his former student, had been engaged to a young woman, Justine Marie. The match was opposed by her grandmother “with all the violence of a temper which deformity”—she is a hunchback—made “sometimes demoniac.” Marie broke the engagement, went into a convent, and died there; since then, M. Paul has supported Marie’s widowed mother and the vile grandmother, taking on (in Père Silas’s words) “their insolent pride the revenge of the purest charity.” [1] Indeed, he also keeps his old tutor in the household, as well. “By this arrangement he has rendered it impossible to himself ever to marry”; he can’t afford it. Père Silas is mostly telling her the truth, but the Jesuit is telling her the truth with a plan in mind, she sees: He continues to want to bring her into the Church. As he soon admits, “I envy Heresy her prey.” She will resist the plot, but she now sees that, for all his theatrics, which made M. Paul “seem to me to lack magnanimity in trifles, yet how great he is in great things!” Not only that, the priest confides, given his continued to devotion to the memory of Marie, “the essence of Emanuel’s nature is—constancy.” That is what he was testing in her, whether it was constancy to the teaching vocation, constancy to her country or constancy to him. “He had become my Christian hero, under that character I wanted to view him.”

But heroes may not be available for marriage. Three questions “were at once the deepest puzzle, the strongest obstruction, and the keenest stimulus, I had ever felt.” Was the ghost of his dead fiancée “an eternal barrier” to marriage, for M. Paul? “And what of the charities which absorbed his worldly goods”—that is, could he support a wife in addition to his fiancée’s remaining family? And “what of his heart, sworn to virginity?” She reduces these three questions to two, presumably the first and the third, since Lucy can and does support herself (although perhaps jealous, disappointed Mme. Beck might have something to say about that). And so she turns the tables and tests him. For starters, exactly where do you live, M. Paul? He admits that his study at the school is his home, and he keeps no servants beyond his own hands. “I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded, and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom an dwell and testament, not to be disputed, has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven.” At this, she tells him the results of her own research, based partly on her own surveillance but mostly on the testimony of the priest. After overcoming his surprise, he wants to know, given this knowledge, can you be my ami, or in English “a close friend,” “intimate and real,” “a sister”? She hesitates, and so he invites her to continue her research, to test him further. Meanwhile, he has another test question for her. Recalling the figure of the nun they saw in the school garden, he asks, “You did not, nor will you fancy, that a saint in Heaven perturbs herself with rivalries of earth? Protestants are rarely superstitious; these morbid fancies will not beset you?” On the contrary, she answers: “I know not what to think of this matter; but I believe a perfectly natural solution of this seeming mystery will one day be arrived at.” He has answered the first question, along with the second. And her expectation will be confirmed a short time later, when she learns from a letter from Ginevra that the nun apparition was none other than Colonel de Hamal in disguise, on one of many visits to his lover at the school.

Then there is one last religious test. He leaves a religious tract in her desk at school, written by Père Silas. “He that had written it was no bad man, and while perpetually betraying the trained cunning—the cloven hoof of his [Jesuit] system—I should pause before accusing himself of sincerity.” She surmises that M. Paul placed the tract with her in order to satisfy the importunities of his friends, worried over his “fraternal communion with a heretic.” When he asks her about it, she ventures, “I thought it made me a little sleepy.” After he leaves, she overhears him praying to the Virgin Mary for her salvation in the Church. “Strange! I had no such feverish wish to turn him from the faith of his fathers. I thought Romanism wrong, a great mixed image of gold and clay; but it seemed to me that this Romanist held the purer elements of his creed with an innocency of heart which God must love.” She considers Romanism defective because its priests are “mitered aspirants for this world’s kingdoms,” without sufficient longing for the kingdom of the next world. “There is a Mercy beyond human compassions, a Love stronger than this strong death which even you [priests] must face, and before it, fall: a charity more potent than any sin, even yours; a Pity which redeems world’s—nay, absolves Priests.” As she tells M. Paul, “the more I saw of Popery the closer I clung to Protestantism”; Protestants keep “fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance.” Given that nature, Protestants eschew confession to priests and go directly to God, praying the Sinner’s Prayer, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” With this, she has met his final test of constancy, her constancy to Protestantism. “‘Whatever say priest or controversialists,’ murmured M. Emanuel, ‘God is good, and loves all the sincere”; as a Catholic, he too prays the Sinner’s Prayer. “It may be that the constancy of one heart, the truth and faith of one mind according to the light He has appointed, import as much to Him as the just motion of satellites around their planets, of planets about their suns, of suns around that mighty unseen center, incomprehensible, irrealizable, with strange mental effort only divined.” And so “God guide us all! God bless you, Lucy!” It is a blessing parallel to the one Lucy whispered to her mental image of Dr. John, just before M. Paul’s crucial intervention. Whether he knows it or not, M. Paul has enunciated the terms of the English religious settlement, the Anglican Church establishment of course abstracted. France and England have reached an Entente Cordiale. Later on, Lucy will reflect, “All Rome could not put into him bigotry, nor the Propaganda itself make him a real Jesuit. He was born honest, and not false—artless, and not cunning—a freeman, and not a slave.” A real French republican who remains faithful to French Catholicism in a spirit of true catholicity can treat with an equally free, unslavish English Protestant.

For Lucy, however, there will be no entente with life in this world. She has a presentiment of that as she watches the happy continuation of Dr. John’s courtship of Paulina. They are among “Nature’s elect,” as distinguished from God’s; “often, these are not pampered, selfish beings” but “harmonious and benign” souls, “men and women with charity, kind agents of God’s kind attributes. Dr. John “was born victor, as some are born vanquished”—including Lucy Snowe. She confirms this, once again, as M. Paul undertakes to do what he had hinted at doing—proceed to leave Europe and take care of an estate at Basseterre (literally, ‘low earth’), Guadeloupe, owned by the old grandmother and in need of looking-after “by a competent agent of integrity” so that it may produce a decent stream of income. M. Paul is such an agent, and the woman has offered him a deal: Do this for two or three and “after that, he should live for himself,” since she and her daughter, a reliable income assured, then will no longer need his financial assistance. Père Silas is happy, as his former student now “runs risk of apostacy” with his Protestant ami; Mme. Beck is happy to destroy (as she hopes) that friendship, even if she no longer can hope to make M. Paul her own. The self-interest of each of M. Paul’s associates will be satisfied.

She must endure one more test, this unintended. M. Paul delays his departure for a few days, and Lucy happens upon him, along with those he supports. One of these is an attractive young woman, his ward. Their obvious affection for one another alarms her; unseen by his party, she retreats to her room in despair. Fortunately visits her at the school, just before departing. Having been surrounded by women rivals more physically attractive than herself—Ginevra, Paulina, even (as she has mistakenly supposed) his ward—she needs one last, crucial, reassurance: “Do I displease your eyes much?” His “short, strong answer” gave her to know “what I was for him,” and “what I might be for the rest of the world, I ceased painfully to care.” More, and unexpectedly, he has provided for her in his absence, setting her up with a school-room attached to an apartment, so that she can have her own students and get away from the surveilling and by unbenignant eye of Mme. Beck. Do the others know this? she asks. “‘Mon ami,’ said he, ‘none knows what I have done save you and myself: the pleasure is consecrated to us two, unshared and unprofaned.'” When she confesses her doubts of him, respecting his intentions toward his young ward, “he gathered me near his heart. I was full of faults; he took them and me all home.” Any Christian will recognize in this an imitatio Christi. But this savior is wholly a man, one who now proposes marriage.

The three years ensuing “were the happiest of my life.” This implies that there will be no happy marriage, and there is none. A seven-day but destructive, anti-creative Atlantic storm takes his boat down on the return voyage. “Here pause,” Lucy tells herself. “There is enough said.” She will not share this last agony with her readers. M. Paul’s work for the others completed, “Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas.” The grandmother lived to be ninety. All profited from his stewardship of the estate. Lucy’s legacy is the story itself, her Christian testimony. 

That testimony is the core of Charlotte Brontë’s novel. Dr. John and Paulina are beautiful, blessed by nature and by nature’s God for lives lived harmoniously, pictures of the classical virtues. Lucy and M. Paul are sublime, persons who will never ‘fit in’ with nature, with ‘this world.’ God harrows them for the next world, for His world, providentially. Human beings imitate divine providence by exercising surveillance. Unlike God, they cannot see all; unlike God, they cannot understand all they see; unlike God, they lack the power to do everything they want, and they lack the perfect justice to want everything they should. True, some are better than others. The innocent and justifiable inquiries of Lucy, and even the secretive surveillance of M. Paul, serve just and even loving purposes. The surveillance of Mme. Beck and of the French Catholic Church in the person of Père Silas, not so much. M. Paul is an apparent Bonaparte; Mme. Beck is a real one, if on a decidedly smaller scale. Lucy fights a war of Napoleonic proportions in her soul, and her victory consists partly of the rule of natural reason over her heart but most essentially of the attunement of her heart to the love of God.

Surveillance aims at ruling; it is a technique of ruling. In the civil-social regime of the French, “sensual indulgence” is allowed, so long as it remains subordinate to the Catholic Church and (often) a monarchic regime. The French may care for their own bodies so long as they leave their souls to their rulers, who rule their souls as much as human beings can do, by keeping a close watch on actions. The French are equal, under monarchy both religious and civil. English civil society is aristocratic—foolishly so, when embodied by a Ginevra Fanshawe, more seriously when embodied by a John Graham Bretton, a bourgeois professional man who marries into a newly-aristocratic family. The virtues of the current and future rulers of England will be found in such as he, and his bride. In Lucy, the English regime shows a soul that will never enter the ruling class but will form its civil-social foundation. Lucy sternly imposes reason on her conduct. This leaves her soul, the part of her no human can directly see, to God’s love, not to the human-all-too-human rule of the Church. An onlooker in life, a ‘loser’ not a ruler, disciplined by reason but rewarded by agapic love, Lucy is providentially directed to pin her hopes on the next life, the Kingdom of God. This is indispensable to the welfare of the English regime and the people its ruling class rules. The majority of people in any regime will not live humanly fulfilled lives. Their charity, their kindness, their ‘other-worldliness’ gives them, and their country, a way of life worth defending. Vive l’Angleterre, l’Histoire et les Héroes, indeed, Charlotte Brontë gives her heroine to say, on the way to this final settlement of the Napoleonic Wars. 

 

Note

1. As M. Paul’s apostolic namesake puts it in Romans 12:20, “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirsts, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.” The Apostle Paul is quoting Proverbs 25: 21-23.