II
The fermentation of ideas was now quickened by the new life of passion—passion social and democratic as the days of Revolution approached; passion also personal and private, which, welcomed as a sacred fire, too often made the inmost being of the individual a scene of agitating and desolating conflict.
The Abbé Raynal (1713-96) made his Histoire des Deux Indes a receptacle not only for just views and useful information, but for every extravagance of thought and sentiment. "Insert into my book," he said to his brother philosophers, "everything that you choose against God, against religion, and against government." In the third edition appears a portrait of the author, posing theatrically, with the inscription, "To the defender of humanity, of truth, of liberty!" The salons caught the temper of the time. Voltairean as they were, disposed to set down Rousseau as an enthusiast or a charlatan, they could not resist the invasion of passion or of sensibility. It mingled with a swarm of incoherent ideas and gave them a new intensity of life. The incessant play of intellect flashed and glittered for many spirits over a moral void; the bitter, almost misanthropic temper of Chamfort's maxims and pensées may testify to the vacuity of faith and joy; sentiment and passion came to fill the void; to desire, to love, to pity, to suffer, to weep, was to live the true life of the heart.
Madame du Deffand (1697-1780) might oppose the demon of ennui with the aid of a cool temperament and a brilliant wit; at sixty-eight, whatever ardour had been secretly stored up in her nature escaped to lavish itself half-maternally on Horace Walpole. Her young companion and reader, who became a rival and robbed her salon of its brilliance, Mlle. de Lespinasse (1732?-76) might cherish a calm friendship for D'Alembert. When M. de Guibert came to succeed M. de Mora in her affections, she poured out the lava torrent of passion in those Letters which have given her a place beside Sappho and beside Eloisa. Madame Roland in her girlhood had been the ardent pupil of Rousseau, whose Nouvelle Héloïse was to her as a revelation from heaven. The first appearance in literature of Madame Necker's amazing daughter was as the eulogist of Rousseau.
The intellect untouched by emotion may be aristocratic; passion and sentiment have popular and democratic instincts. "The Revolution was already in action," said Napoleon, "when in 1784 Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro appeared upon the stage." If Napoleon's words overstate the fact, we may at least name that masterpiece of comedy a symptom of the coming explosion, or even, in Sainte-Beuve's words, an armed Fronde.
Pierre-Augustin Caron, who took the name of BEAUMARCHAIS (1732-99), son of a watchmaker of Paris, was born under a merry star, with a true genius for comedy, yet his theatrical pieces were only the recreations of a man of affairs—a demon of intrigue—determined to build up his fortune by financial adventures and commercial enterprises. Suddenly in 1774-75 he leaped into fame. Defeated in a trial in which his claim to fifteen thousand livres was disputed, Beaumarchais, in desperate circumstances, made his appeal to public opinion in four Mémoires, which admirably united seriousness, gaiety, argument, irony, eloquence, and dramatic talent. "I am a citizen," he cried—"that is to say, something wholly new, unknown, unheard of in France. I am a citizen—that is to say, what you should have been two hundred years ago, what perhaps you will be twenty years hence." The word "citizen" sounded strange in 1774; it was soon to become familiar.
Before this incident Beaumarchais had produced two dramas, Eugénie and Les Deux Amis, of the tearful, sentimental, bourgeois type, yet with a romantic tendency, which distinguishes at least Eugénie from the bourgeois drama of Diderot and of Sedaine. The failure of the second may have taught their author the wisdom of mirth; he abandoned his high dramatic principles to laugh and to evoke laughter. Le Barbier de Séville, developed from a comic opera to a comedy in five acts, was given, after long delays, in 1775. The spectators manifested fatigue; instantly the play reappeared in four acts, Beaumarchais having lost no time in removing the fifth wheel from his carriage. It delighted the public by the novelty of its abounding gaiety, a gaiety full and free, yet pointed with wit, a revolving firework scattering its dazzling spray. The old comic theme of the amorous tutor, the charming pupil, the rival lover, adorned with the prestige of youth, the intriguing attendant, was renewed by a dialogue which was alive with scintillating lights.
From the success of the Barbier sprang Le Mariage de Figaro. Completed in 1778, the royal opposition to its performance was not overcome until six years afterwards. By force of public opinion the watchmaker's son had triumphed over the King. The subject of the play is of a good tradition—a daring valet disputes the claim of a libertine lord to the possession of his betrothed. Spanish colour and Italian intrigue are added to the old mirth of France. From Regnard the author had learnt to entangle a varied intrigue; from Lesage he borrowed his Spanish costumes and decoration—Figaro himself is a Gil Blas upon the stage; in Marivaux he saw how women may assert themselves in comic action with a bright audacity. The Mariage de Figaro resumes the past; it depicts the present, as a social satire, and a painting of manners; it conveys into art the experience, the spirit, the temerity of Beaumarchais's adventurous life as a man of the world; it creates characters—Almaviva, Suzanne, Figaro himself, the budding Chérubin. It is at the same time—or, rather, became through its public reception—a pamphlet in comedy which announces the future; it ridicules the established order with a sprightly insolence; it pleads for social equality; it exposes the iniquity of aristocratic privilege, the venality of justice, the greed of courtiers, the chicanery of politicians. Figaro, since he appeared in "The Barber of Seville," has grown somewhat of a moralist and a pedant; he must play the part of censor of society, he must represent the spirit of independent criticism, he must maintain the cause of intelligence against the authority of rank and station. Beaumarchais may have lacked elevation and delicacy, but he knew his craft as a dramatist, and left a model of prose comedy from which in later years others of his art and mystery made profitable studies. He restored mirth to the stage; he rediscovered theatrical intrigue; he created a type, which was Beaumarchais himself, and was also the lighter genius of France; he was the satirist of society; he was the nimble-feathered bird that foretells the storm.
III
BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE connects Rousseau with Chateaubriand and the romantic school of the nineteenth century. The new feeling for external nature attained through him a wider range, embracing the romance of tropic lands; it acquired an element of the exotic; at the same time, descriptive writing became more vivid and picturesque, and the vocabulary for the purposes of description was enlarged. He added to French literature a tale in which human passion and the sentiment of nature are fused together by the magic of genius; he created two figures which live in the popular imagination, encircled with a halo of love and sorrow.
Born at Havre in 1737, Bernardin, through his imagination, was an Utopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer; through his temper, an angry disputant with society. His life was a fantastic series of adventures. Having read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the heroic record of the travels and sufferings of Jesuit missionaries, his fancy caught fire; he would seek some undiscovered island in mid-ocean, he would found some colony of the true children of nature, far from a corrupt civilisation, peaceable, virtuous, and free.
In France, in Russia, he was importunate in urging his extravagant designs upon persons of influence. When the French Government in 1767 commissioned him to work in Madagascar, he believed that his dream was to come true, but a rude awakening and the accustomed quarrels followed. He landed on the Isle of France, purposing to work as an engineer, and there spent his days in gazing at the sea, the skies, the mountains, the tropical forests. All forms and colours and sounds and scents impressed themselves on his brain, and were transferred to his collection of notes. When, on returning to Paris, he published (1773) his Voyage à l'Île de France, the literature of picturesque description may be said to have been founded. Already in this volume his feeling for nature is inspired by an emotional theism, and is burdened by his sentimental science, which would exhibit a fantastic array of evidences of the designs for human welfare of an amiable and ingenious Author of nature. Before the book appeared, Bernardin had made the acquaintance of Rousseau, then living in retirement, tormented by his diseased suspicions and cloudy indignations. To his new disciple Rousseau was in general gracious, and they rambled together, botanising in the environs of Paris.
For a time Bernardin himself was in a condition bordering upon insanity; but the crisis passed, and he employed himself on the Études de la Nature, which appeared in three volumes in 1784. The tale of Paul et Virginie was not included; for when the author had read it aloud, though ladies wept, the sterner auditors had been contemptuous; Thomas slumbered, and Buffon called for his carriage. The Études accumulate the grotesque notions of Bernardin with reference to final causes in nature: nature is benevolent and harmonious; society is corrupt and harsh; scientific truth is to be discovered by sentiment, and not by reason; the whole universe is planned for the happiness of man; the melon is large because it was designed for the family; the pumpkin is larger, because Providence intended that it should be shared with our neighbours. Providence, indeed, in a sceptical and mocking generation, suffered cruelly at the hands of its advocate. Yet Bernardin conveyed into his book a feeling of the rich and obscure life and energy of nature; his descriptive power is admirable. "He desired," says M. Barine, "to open the door for Providence to enter; in fact he opened the door for the great Pan," and in this he was a precursor of much that followed in literature.
Bernardin's fame was now established. In the sentimental reaction against the dryness of sceptical philosophy, in the return to a feeling for the poetical aspect of things, he was looked upon as a leader. In the fourth volume of Études (1788) he had courage to print the tale of Paul et Virginie. It is an idyll of the tropics, written with the moral purpose of contrasting the beneficent influence of nature and of feeling with the dangers and evils of civilised society and of the intellect. The children grow up side by side in radiant innocence and purest companionship; then passion makes its invasion of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces and the faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot hide, the genuine power of those pages which tell of the modest ardours of first love. An element of melodrama mingles with the tragic close. Throughout we do more than see the landscape of the tropics: we feel the life of external nature throbbing in sympathy with human emotion. Something was gained by Bernardin from the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus in the motives and the details of his story, but it is essentially his own. It had a resounding success, and among its most ardent admirers was Napoleon.
Bernardin married at fifty-five, and became the father of a Paul and a Virginie. On the death of his wife, whom he regarded as a faithful housekeeper, he married again, and his life was divided between the devotion of an old man's love and endless quarrels with his colleagues of the Institut. His later writings added nothing to his fame. La Chaumière Indienne—the story of a pariah who learns wisdom from nature and from the heart—has a certain charm, but it lacks the power of the better portions of Paul et Virginie. The Harmonies de la Nature is a feeble reflection of the Études. Chateaubriand, to whom Bernardin was personally known, gave a grudging recognition of the genius of his precursor. Lamartine, in after years, was a more generous disciple. In January 1814 Bernardin died, murmuring the name of God; among the great events of the time his death was almost unnoticed.
IV
In the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by the labours of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, came a revival of the study of antiquity and of the sentiment for classical art. The Count de Caylus (1692-1765), travelling in Italy and the East with the enthusiasm of an archæologist, presented in his writings an ideal of beauty and grace which was new to sculptors and painters of the time. The discovery of Pompeii followed, after an interval, the discovery of Herculaneum. The Abbé BARTHÉLEMY (1716-95) embodied the erudite delights of a lifetime in his Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1788), which seemed a revelation of the genius of Hellenism as it existed four centuries prior to the Christian era. It was an ideal Greece—the Greece of Winckelmann and Goethe—unalterably gracious, radiantly calm, which was discovered by the eighteenth century; but it served the imaginative needs of the age. We trace its influence in the harmonious forms of Bernardin's and Chateaubriand's imagining, and in the marbles of Canova. A poet, the offspring of a Greek mother and a French father—André Chénier—a latter-day Greek or demi-Greek himself, and yet truly a man of his own century, interpreted this new ideal in literary art.
Born at Constantinople in 1762, ANDRÉ CHÉNIER was educated in France, travelled in Switzerland and Italy, resided as secretary to the French Ambassador for three weary years in England—land of mists, land of dull aristocrats—returned to France in 1790, ardent in the cause of constitutional freedom, and defended his opinions and his friends as a journalist. The violences of the Revolution drove him into opposition to the Jacobin party. In March 1794 he was arrested; on the 25th July, two days before the overthrow of Robespierre, André Chénier's head fell on the scaffold.
Only two poems, the Jeu de Paume and the Hymne aux Suisses, were published by Chénier; after his death appeared in journals the Jeune Captive and the Jeune Tarentine; his collected poems, already known in manuscript to lovers of literature, many of them fragmentary, were issued in 1819. The romantic school had come into existence without his aid; but under Sainte-Beuve's influence it chose to regard him as a predecessor, and during the years about 1830 he was studied and imitated as a master.
He belongs, however, essentially to the eighteenth century, to its graceful sensuality, its revival of antiquity, its faith in human reason, its comprehensive science of nature and of society. In certain of his poems suggested by public occasions he is little more than a disciple of Lebrun. His Élégies are rather Franco-Roman than Greek; these, together with beauties of their own, have the characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the mundane voluptuousness of their age. His philosophical poem Hermès, of which we have designs and fragments, would have been the De Rerum Natura of an admiring student of Buffon.
In his Églogues and his epic fragments he is a Greek or a demi-Greek, who has learnt directly from Homer, from the pastoral and idyllic poets of antiquity, and from the Anthology. The Greece of Chénier's imagination is the ideal Greece of his time, more finely outlined, more delicately coloured, more exquisitely felt by him than was possible with his contemporaries in an age of prose. "It is the landscape-painter's Greece," writes M. Faguet, "the Greece of fair river-banks, of gracious hill-slopes, of comely groups around a well-head or a stream, of harmonious theories beside the voiceful sea, of dancing choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blue heavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the light breathing of the Cyclades."
In the Ïambes, inspired by the emotions of the Revolution during his months of imprisonment, Chénier united modern passion with the beauty of classic form; satire in these loses its critical temper, and becomes truly lyrical. In his versification he attained new and alluring harmonies; he escaped from the rhythmical uniformity of eighteenth-century verse, gliding sinuously from line to line and from strophe to strophe. He did over again for French poetry the work of the Pléiade, but he did this as one who was a careful student and a critic of Malherbe.
BOOK THE FIFTH
1789-1850
CHAPTER I
THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE—MADAME DE STAËL—CHATEAUBRIAND
I
The literature of the Revolution and the Empire is that of a period of transition. Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand announce the future; the writers of an inferior rank represent with declining power the past, and give some faint presentiment of things to come. The great political concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract ideas united with the passions of the hour produced poetry which was of the nature of a declamatory pamphlet. Innumerable pieces were presented on the stage, but their literary value is insignificant.
Marie-Joseph Chénier (1764-1811), brother of the great poet who perished on the scaffold, attempted to inaugurate a school of national tragedy in his Charles IX.; neither he nor the public knew history or possessed the historical sentiment—his tragedy was a revolutionary "school of kings." Arnault, Legouvé, Népomucène Lemercier were applauded for their classic dignity, or their depth of characterisation, or their pomp of language. The true tragedy of the time was enacted in the streets and in the clubs. Comedy was welcome in days of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harleville drew mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in Le Vieux Célibataire (1792); Fabre d'Eglantine moralised Molière to the taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante debased by egoism and accommodations with the world; Louis Laya, during the trial of the King, satirised the pretenders to patriotism in L'Ami des Lois, yet escaped the vengeance of the Jacobins.
Historical comedy, a novelty in art, was seen in Lemercier's Pinto (1799), where great events are reduced to petty dimensions, and the destiny of nations is satirically viewed as a vulgar game of trick-track. In his Christophe Colomb of 1809 he dared to despise the unities of time and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless, among the spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial régime. Baour-Lormian, the translator of Ossian (1801), converted the story of Joseph in Egypt into a frigid tragedy; Hector and Tippoo Sahib, Mahomet II., and Ninus II. (with scenes of Spanish history transported to Assyria) diversified the stage. The greatest success was that of Raynouard's Les Templiers (1805); the learned author wisely applied his talents in later years to romance philology. Among the writers of comedy—Andrieux, Étienne, Duval, and others—Picard has the merit of reproducing the life of the day, satirising social classes and conditions with vivacity and careless mirth. In melodrama, Pixérécourt contributed unconsciously to prepare the way for the romantic stage. Désaugiers, with his gift for gay plebeian song, was the master of the vaudeville.
Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice during the Revolution. The lesser Chénier's Chanson du Départ has in it a stirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Republic sent forth to war with the acclaim of mother and wife and maiden, old men and little children. Lebrun-Pindare, in his ode Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur, does not quite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of classical imagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse and music, La Marseillaise (1792), was an inspiration which equally lent itself to the enthusiasm of victory and the gallantries of despair. The pseudo-epics and the descriptive poetry of the Empire are laboured and lifeless. But Creuzé de Lesser, in his Chevaliers de la Table-Ronde (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian, in his Poésies Ossianiques, widened the horizons of literature. The Panhypocrisiade of Lemercier, published in 1819, but written several years earlier—an "infernal comedy of the sixteenth century"—is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, and genius; it bears to Hugo's Légende des Siècles the relation which the megatherium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous analogues.
If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's poetry, we may find it in the harmonious melancholy of Chênedollé, in the grace of Fontanes' stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications. The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition, for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details. If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out what was commonplace in ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature in the eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and had become a social and political weapon; under the imperial rule this militant function was withdrawn; what remained for literature but frigid ambitions or petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once again recovered?
The Revolution closed the salons and weakened the influence of cultivated society upon literature. Journalism and the pamphlet filled the place left vacant by the salons. The Décade Philosophique was the organ of the ideologists, who applied the conceptions of Condillac and his followers to literary and philosophical criticism. In 1789 the Journal des Débats was founded. Much ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was expended in the columns of the public press. Among the contributors were André Chénier, Mallet du Pin, Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine, Camille Desmoulins hoped to render France happy, prosperous, and republican. Heady, vain, pleasure-loving, gay, bitter, sensitive, with outbreaks of generosity and moments of elevation, he did something to redeem his crimes and follies by pleas for justice and mercy in his journal, Le Vieux Cordelier, and died, with Danton as his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and despair.
The orators of the Revolution glorified doctrinaire abstractions, overflowed with sentimental humanity, and decorated their harangues with heroic examples of Roman virtue. The most abstract, colourless, and academic was Rousseau's disciple, who took the "Supreme Being" under his protection, Robespierre. The fervid spirit of the Girondins found its highest expression in Vergniaud, who, with infirm character, few ideas, and a hesitating policy, yet possessed a power of vibrating speech. Danton, the Mirabeau of the populace, was richer in ideas, and with sudden accesses of imagination thundered in words which tended to action; but in general the Mountain cared more for deeds than words. The young Saint-Just thrilled the Convention with icy apothegms which sounded each, short and sharp, like the fall of the knife. Barnave, impetuous in his temper, was clear and measured in discourse, and once in opposition to Mirabeau, defending the royal prerogative, rose beyond himself to the height of a great occasion.
But it was MIRABEAU, and Mirabeau alone, who possessed the genius of a great statesman united with the gifts of an incomparable orator. Born in 1749, of the old Riquetti family, impulsive, proud, romantic, yet clear of intellect and firmly grasping facts, a thinker and a student, calmly indifferent to religion, irregular in his conduct, the passionate foe of his father, the passionate lover of his Sophie and of her child, he had conceived, and in a measure comprehended, the Revolution long before the explosion came. Already he was a copious author on political subjects. He knew that France needed individual liberty and individual responsibility; he divined the dangers of a democratic despotism. He hoped by the decentralisation of power to balance Paris by the provinces, and quicken the political life of the whole country; he desired to balance the constitution by playing off the King against the Assembly, and the Assembly against the King, and to control the action of each by the force of public opinion. From Montesquieu he had learnt the gains of separating the legislative, the executive, and the judicial functions. His hatred of aristocracy, enhanced by the hardship of imprisonment at Vincennes, led him to ignore an influence which might have assisted in the equilibration of power. As an orator his ample and powerful rhetoric rested upon a basis of logic; slow and embarrassed as he began to speak, he warmed as he proceeded, negligent of formal correctness, disdainful of the conventional classical decorations, magnificent in gesture, weaving together ideas, imagery, and passion. His speech, said Madame de Staël, was "like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilful artist, and fashioning men to his will." At the sitting of the Assembly on April 2, 1791, the President announced, amid murmurs, "Ah! il est mort," which anticipated his words, that Gabriel-Honoré Riquetti was dead.
"The 18th Brumaire," writes M. Lanson, "silenced the orators. For fifteen years a solitary voice was heard, imperious but eloquent.... Napoleon was the last of the great Revolutionary orators." As he advanced in power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric, and condensed his summons to action into direct, effective words, now simple and going straight at some motive of self-interest, now grandiose to seduce the imagination to his side. Speech with Napoleon was a means of government, and he knew the temper of the men whom he addressed. His own taste in literature was touched with sentimentality; Ossian and Werther were among his favourite books; but what may be styled the official literature of the Empire was of the decaying classical or neo-classical tradition.
Yet while the democratic imperialism was the direct offspring of the Revolution with its social contract and its rights of man, it was necessary to combat eighteenth-century ideas and defend the throne and the altar. Great scientific names—Laplace, Bichat, Cuvier, Lamarck—testify to the fact that a movement which made the eighteenth century illustrious had not spent its force. Scholarship was laying the bases for future constructions; Ginguené published in 1811 the first volumes of his Histoire Littéraire de l'Italie; Fauriel and Raynouard accumulated the materials for their historical, literary, and philological studies. Philosophy was turning away from sensationalism, which seemed to have said its final word, towards spiritualist conceptions. Maine de Biran (1766-1824) found in the primitive fact of consciousness—the nisus of the will—and in the self-recognition of the ego as a cause, an escape from materialism. Royer-Collard (1763-1845), afterwards more distinguished in politics than he was in speculation, read for his class at the Sorbonne from the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and turned it by his commentary as a siege-train against the positions of Condillac.
The germs of new literary growths were in the soil; but the spring came slowly, and after the storms of Revolution were spent, a chill was in the air. Measureless hopes, and what had come of them? infinite desire, and so poor an attainment! A disciple of Rousseau, who shared in his sentiment without his optimistic faith, and who, like Rousseau, felt the beauty of external nature without Rousseau's sense of its joy, Étienne Pivert de SÉNANCOURT published in 1799 his Rêveries, a book of disillusion, melancholy atheism, and stoical resistance to sadness, a resistance which he was unable to sustain. It was followed in 1804 by Obermann, a romance in epistolary form, in which the writer, disguised in the character of his hero, expresses a fixed and sterile grief, knowing not what he needs, nor what he loves, nor what he wills, lamenting without a cause and desiring without an object. The glories of Swiss landscape, which quicken his imagination, do not suffice to fill the void that is in his soul; yet perhaps in old age—if ever it come—he may resign himself to the infinite illusion of life. It is an indication of the current of the time that fifteen years later, when the Libres Méditations appeared, Sénancourt had found his way through a vague theopathy to autumnal brightness, late-born hope, and tranquil reconcilement with existence.
The work of the professional critics of the time—Geoffroy, De Féletz, Dussault, Hoffman—counts now for less than the words of one who was only an amateur of letters, and a moralist who never moralised in public. JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824), the friend of Fontanes and of Chateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity for ideas, and possessing the finest sense of the beauty of literature, lacked the strength and self-confidence needful in a literary career. He read everything; he published nothing; but the Pensées, which were collected from his manuscripts by Chateaubriand, and his letters reveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious dilettante charmed by literary grace, a writer tormented by the passion to put a volume in a page, a page in a phrase, a phrase in a word. Plato in philosophy, Virgil in poetry, satisfy his feeling for beauty and refinement of style. From Voltaire and Rousseau he turns away, offended by their lack of moral feeling, of sanity, of wisdom, of delicacy. A man of the eighteenth century, Joubert had lifted himself into thin clear heights of middle air, where he saw much of the past and something of the future; but the middle air is better suited for speculation than for action.