The Incomparable Heroine

...Why...

...T tiresome O the Editor:~Discussions and when conducted in at periodicals a range of 3,000 are apt nautical to be miles (or whatever the width of the Atlantic is) may easily become futile...

...She tried to evade her pain and mourning by lavishing her affection upon one of Maurice's friends, the famous and eccentric novelist, Barbey d'Aurevilly, whom she calls her "brother of Paris" in the journal...

...Friday, July, I% at half after eleven...

...The documents which have come into my hands have enabled me to render more precise a personality which had been seen in only one dimension, and to put her back into her own surroundings...

...juar~s, the famous Socialist leader, had an enthusiastic admiration for Eug6nie and Maurice, his compatriots...

...Mermen I'll not care For your lips, Nor your brilliant stare Like sapphire chips...

...Now a cloud of sorrow more dense than that which had enveiled her since birth covers her with its shadow...

...her solicitudes and anxieties to the letters or in London during I865, and that of her brother Maurice was published in New York during I867, with an introductory essay by Matthew Arnold...

...O water knit me a gown, A shroud to wear...

...It is read in England and America...

...O fishes under stones Hone your teeth, You may have my bones And my wreath...

...O white spray wind me a crown For matted hair...

...Cram d~es not like the church at Raincy...

...ATTWATER REPLIES Wales...

...One is privileged to follow her into the salons of her relatives and friends...

...These researches and discoveries have enabled the Abb~ Barth~s to reconstruct in its milieu and epoch the life of Eugenic de Gu~rin...

...DE GUERIN A translation is no of stranger her Journal to the appeared Englishand She moral confided danger...

...During May of the present year, M. l'Abb6 Barth~s, professor at the Grand Seminaire of Albi and compatriot of the De Gu~rins, presented to the faculty of the Sorbonne a thesis on The Life of Eug~nie de Gu~rin, supplemented with a secondary thesis on The Letters of Eug4nie de Gu4rin to Her Brother Maurice...

...Her influence has gone everywhere...

...Cram, Mr...

...She who sought to be nothing of the sort appears to us as an incomparable directress of souls...

...She followed him everywhere---to college, to La ChSnaie where Lamennais lived in order to bestow upon him the wealth of her tenderness and to ward off from him spiritual the journal which she wrote from day to day at Maurice's request...

...but she lays clown neither the shape of church buildings nor the material ef whi:h they are to be built...

...As for vernacular liturgies, the Byzantine Catholics of * But then I am not an architect...

...the Indian colony in the Rue du Cherche Midi...

...It pierces to the heart...

...Here are newly discovered letters, fragments of a diary, and even a complete diary, written either by Eug~nle or Maurice de Gu~rin...

...In a special chapter, the biographer considers "the sense of the Divine" in Eug~nie's life, revealing her as one proceeding with increasing swiftness toward God, constantly more holy and charitable...

...In reality," says the Abb4 BarthSs, "we have divined rather than known her...

...But time, which permits dust to accumulate, does lessen reticence...

...and from her voluminous correspondence with Lorisse de Bayne, almost completely unearthed by the Abb4 Barth~s, one might derive a most luminous film of womanly friendship...

...This illustrious critic called Eug~nle "a French Antigone uplifted and ennobled by the Christian faith...

...She could not take her heart from him who had gone...

...On the morning after his burial, she noticed upon her table the journal to which she confided "the heart of my heart, for him alone...

...History does not support such a view...

...Here one may also learn what was the life of a humble chatelaine in Languedoc during the reigns of Charles X and Louis Phillipe, and discern the delicacy and depth of her Christian faith...

...When an edition of her Letters appeared in Paris during I865, Henry James, then just twenty years of age, declared: "A delicate mind, an affectionate heart, a pious soul having the gift of feeling and expression in equal measure--and this not from poverty of the former faculty, but from the absolute richness of the latter...

...Family mementos have been confided to me," says the Abb~, "sometimes piece by piece, but more frequently in large bundles...

...This is nonsense...

...Corals for my arm Or in a ring, Have no power to charm-Nor anything" Only water weaving In monotone, Can stop my ache and grieving, This alone...

...During this period of her life, Eug4nie lived in Paris and knew the society and the salons of the epoch...

...Thus he was able to correct and complete what had already been published by Tr~butien, and also to collect material enough to fill three large octavo volumes...

...Cram will further agree that we must use contemporary godless industrial conditions of building...

...Rambusch, and to do so would, moreover, lay me open to the charge of indulging in that infantile proceeding of chucking a brick and then running away...

...q/Pater Tune The wet green shuttles rock From stone to stone, The jade and white threads lock, The shuttles drone...

...T H E C O M M O N W E A L 46 THE INCOMPARABLE HEROINE By ALPHONSE LUGAN E UGENIE speaking world...

...She was just a maid of fifteen when she devoted all the energies of her feminine soul, then already religious and profound, to November I3, I929 her brother...

...and she wrote: "This also is for him...

...One can follow the moving history of this friendship in the first volume of this new Vie d'Eug4nie de Gu4rin...

...The second volume is devoted to the years which followed the death of her brother in I839...

...Not having been able to save her brother from death, Eug~nie would doubtless have ended her own life had not faith intervened...

...The aggregation of these facts again resolved itself under the reader's eye into a figure of sweetness so perfect, so uniform and so simple that it seems to belong rather to the biography of a mediaeval saint than to the complex mechanism of our actual llfe...

...And are we to picture the classical revivalists offering their wares and the Church accepting them under protest as a not-better article...

...I. Mr...

...He has summoned to life again the milieux in which the De Gu6rins lived--Cayla, the desolate solitude of which explains the ennui which pursued Eug6nie her life long...

...But it cannot be any purpose here to discuss so delicate and controversial a matter...

...First of all, I did not write, and certainly never meant to imply, that we were "under no circumstances to try to recover some of the . . . spirit of the art of Catholic society...

...What evidence have we for thinking that the clergy were any more exigent then than now...

...Cram's gloss makes a rather important modification of those premises of mine with which he agrees, when it states that the Church took the best art that was available and kept askiny for better...

...This we can now follow, almost day by day, seeing the child in the provincial castle at Cayla, the girl who lost her mother at fourteen, already deeply religious, receiving careful instruction from her father and occupying the place of her dead mother in so far as Maurice was concerned...

...For Maurice dead, for Maurice in heaven...

...I believe that this vast work, the third volume of which presents an exhaustive sequence of texts and bibliographies, is definitive...

...and, indeed, what was Mademoiselle de Gu~rin, after all, but a mediaeval saint ?" But until recently nothing was known of the writings of Eug~nle excepting the Journal and the Letters published by Tr~butlen, a librarian of the city of Caen...

...The fame of her brother had begun to spread...

...I do (the difference has no effect on the truth of the matter...

...The Church definitely legislates for the material and shape of vestments and for the sort of music to be used in church...

...They, at least, have not committed treason...

...I think so, too, but I have a suspicion that in his legitimate enthusiasm for his heroine, the Abb6 Barth~s may have idealized her...

...That they were any better at "art-criticism" then than now...

...and the salons where Barbey displayed his dapper person...

...There she died on May 3I, I848...

...But he neglected her brutally, and she quarreled with one of her dearest friends, Madame de Maistre, in her anxiety to bring the soul of Barbey nearer to God...

...He calls concrete "obscene" (and Bessemer steel, an excellent article, is "absurdly named...

...How tender and full of delight is the name of brother...

...Cram probably knows both these buildings, even if many of your readers do not...

...Everybody knew that these represented only a selection from her work, and the countless persons who were interested looked forward impatiently to the time when all that she had written, without a thought of posterity or the seeking for glory, might be published...

...Not necessarily as bad building materials (though we agree there are better, but not always easily available) but in some esoteric way as bad ethically...

...My own investigations permit me to confirm the discoveries of the Abb6 and to predict that his work will achieve a genuine success...

...But it would be discourteous to neglect the letters of Mr...

...4. There is no parallel between vestments or plain-chant and church buildings...

...One finds the Journal in almost every Catholic home, in Protestant circles, and in the hands of Jews who appreciate it highly...

...47 . . . . i COMMUNICATIONS MR...

...we deplore them but, if we don't use them, we shall have no churches at all or else must worship in plain rectangular halls built by our own hands of stock brick or concrete blocks (and a jolly good thing too, say I * ) . Then, since we must accept the conditions, why not accept the materials, and the forms and technique...

...On the contrary...

...So far as I know, nothing in any language equals the beauty of the sobs, the outcries, the confidences, the joys and sorrows expressed here...

...2. Now as for my non sequitur...

...Copeland makes no bones about it...

...The true figure of Eug4nie has emerged...

...3. That, I believe, is the real difference between us...

...Copeland and Mr...

...She is a strong woman, faithful to her concept of duty, infinitely kind of disposition, one of the abiding exemplars of sisterly and friendly affection...

...I have a painful notion that Mr...

...Cram regards concrete, steel and so forth, as bad...

...But broken in spirit by the cruelty of Barbey,--which the Abb~ Barth~s terms "a second death of Maurice"---she returned to her native country more alone than ever...

...I believe that literary America will be interested in this work and will join in the hope that it may ultimately be completed by the publication of still further volumes...

...During her short life she knew the tug of anguish at the heart...

...so far as they are possible under existing circumstances, the spirit and the principles~-which do not involve the same materials or forms-are exactly what we want...

...Brittany, La Chfinaie, and the Val de l'Arguenon...

...It's either a practicable building material or it's not, and that's all there is to it...

...Her friends sought to publish the manuscripts he had left behind, and she aided them with all her energy...

...And if she has now come much closer to us, how much more charming and human she has also become...

...Dust did not conceal them more carefully than did the good taste and discretion of the homes where their author had resided...

...How can concrete be obscene or natural stone chaste...

...She bore up under many a painful blow, suffered through countless disappointments and injustices, submitted perforce to cruel separations...

...Unforgettable date...

...Cram will agree, does not depend on materials or "style") than have, e.g., the Catholic churches at Norwich and Arundel (Mr...

...I wish rather to join, with all possible sincerity, in the praise which M. Abel Lefranc, a fervent admirer of the De Gu6rins, addressed to our author at a convocation of the Sorbonne: "Having been a witness, during twenty years, of the research undertaken by the Abb6 Barthbs, I render homage to his vast marshaling of documentary evidence which bears the stamp of unflagging conscientiousness...

...Little by little the Gu~rin dossier took on strangely voluminous proportions on my study table...

...Now she is not merely 'the dreamer of the terrace, with T H E C O M M O N W E A L November I3, I929 ~ . 9 the thin shoulders of a locust' and the figure of an ascetic...

...He was the glory and the joy of my heart...

...Is this the authentic voice of progressive American civilization...

...But I like it precisely because it seems to me that the people responsible for it have produced a building that has far more of that spirit (which, Mr...

...During more than twenty years the Abb6 has busily searched the public archives and family papers of places in which Eug~nie lived, with a view to discovering impressions left by her spirit...

...RUTH LAnGLAnD HOLB~RC...

...But trial, which could not disrupt the integrity of her spirit, served rather to purify it...

...I think Mr...

...That the western Church and the eastern Church were not quite on "all fours" in this matter of "mothering the arts" I concede...

...Five years previously an anonymous contributor to the Spectator had written: "We are no admirers of the Roman Catholic faith, but it may well be proud if it can subdue, satisfy and sustain many human lives as simple, beautiful and deep as Eug4nie de Gu4rin's...

...No, my friend, death shall not separate us, it shall not tear you from my thought...

...Eugfnie de Gu6rin is of universal fame...

...Here she remained quite as spiritual as at Cayla...