Philosopher, contemning wealth and death,

Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love."

Not merely then a "footless bird of Paradise," but "childlike, full of life and love." With this word I may fitly close.

EDMOND SCHERER.

THE death of Edmond Scherer, which took place on Saturday, March 16th, 1889, deprived French literature, not indeed of a great thinker, not perhaps even of a critic of the highest order, but of a perfectly sincere seeker for the truth in matters religious, political, and literary, and a writer whose curiosity about ideas was always liberal and serious. He has been spoken of as if he were Sainte-Beuve's successor in French criticism; but Sainte-Beuve has had no successor. It was not

merely that Scherer had not, as Matthew Arnold put it, Sainte-Beuve's elasticity and cheerfulness, SainteBeuve's gaiety and radiancy; he lacked Sainte-Beuve's vast erudition and his mastery of literary detail. His studies are nourished with ideas, but each of them has not the air of being the work of a writer who for the time being had made himself a specialist in that particular province, and the marvel of SainteBeuve's causeries is this-that he handles a thousand topics and shows himself to be a specialist, almost infallible in his accuracy, with reference to each. Scherer, says Matthew Arnold, had the same openmindedness as Sainte-Beuve. Yes, open-minded to ideas he was, and his training as a student of philosophy gave him access to certain regions of thought which Sainte-Beuve hardly ventured to approach.

But he had not in the same degree as Sainte-Beuve that open-heartedness to all varieties of literary pleasures, which is the indispensable condition of a generous equity in literary judgment.

He had indeed as a critic more in common with Matthew Arnold than with Sainte-Beuve. But behind the critic in Matthew Arnold lay the poet, and though M. Colani has assured us that there was the material for a poet in Scherer, this poet hardly once comes forward even to peer wistfully through the prison-bars of abstract ideas. Nor had he Matthew Arnold's gift of light irony, Matthew Arnold's happy malice of the pen, nor his fortunate or unfortunate knack of inventing catch-words, which served to give currency to his ideas. He resembled Arnold in the moral rigour, which was something deeper in each than literary culture—a moral rigour derived, in the one instance, from the impress of the noble character of the master of Rugby, in the other that of a Parisian by birth-from the influences of Protestant Geneva. He resembled Arnold also in the fact that his intellectual life was felt by him to be that of a wanderer between two worlds,

"One dead,

The other powerless to be born."

He tried to think for himself, and to some extent succeeded; but he sadly yet resignedly acknowledges that most of his thinking was done for him by the spirit of the age; that he could not resist the strong pressure of the time; that he found himself compelled in honesty to walk in ways of thought difficult and dangerous,

ways which in the end might open upon some destructive precipice.

The

The

The volume entitled "Mélanges d'Histoire Religieuse (1864) marks the season of transition from his earlier period - that of the Professor of Exegesis at the Genevan École Évangélique, to his later period, that of the critic of a Parisian journal. He had ceased by this time to hope for the attainment of any absolute truth by means either of theology or philosophy. The thinker who chases absolute truth, he says, is a man who would leap away from his own shadow. discovery of the relative character of truths is, he declares, the capital fact in the history of contemporary thought. Hegelianism had had its day; it was the conjuror's goblet, under which the conjuror finds what he himself has put there, and nothing more. authority of the Churches and of the Bible had crumbled away under the disintegrating touch of criticism. "I have occupied myself for long," he writes in his introduction, "with these subjects [religious history and philosophy]; I have taken an active part in the discussions which so deeply interest the public of our day; I have known in turn the sweet and bitter fruits of knowledge, the charm of enfranchisement, and the sadness which great ruins inspire. I am far from believing that I have either opened or closed the cycle of those researches to which I have devoted myself, but it seems to me that I have almost finished the task which has fallen to me. What strikes me most in reviewing the way which I have traversed, is to see how the general movement

overmasters the individual initiative.

What is our personal thought, our personal effort in comparison with that secret logic which proposes problems, each in its turn, and resolves them with a sovereign authority?" Belief in moral freedom, belief in the duality of soul and body, these also, he admits, must be regarded as of no more than relative significance, beliefs deep-seated in the heart of humanity, yet which express only the individual point of view. Because we make admissions such as these are we, he asks, to be denounced as sceptics? The sceptic, indeed, has a right to exist as well as the dogmatist. But the real sceptic here is he who is indifferent to the truth, or he who, not regarding the truth in all seriousness, makes no strict demand for evidence. "I am resigned beforehand," writes Scherer, "to every truth, and to every consequence of every truth. Is this the attitude of the sceptic? The genuine sceptic is the partisan, he whose resting-place is already found as to every question, he who has taken up a position once for all, and who no longer dreams of defending it; the man who looks to the social, moral, or religious utility of ideas rather than to their conformity with facts. Let us be assured that what has least of seriousness in our frivolous society, what is least healthy and least sincere, is precisely that dogmatism which claims for itself so readily the monopoly of sincerity and seriousness."

Let us turn from Scherer the student of religion and philosophy to Scherer the critic of literature. Here too he is characterised by those moral qualities which ally themselves with qualities purely intellectual; the