Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/669

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ARNAULT—ARNDT
627

persecution. Arnauld emerged from his retirement, was most graciously received by Louis XIV., and treated almost as a popular hero. He now set to work with Nicole (q.v.) on a great work against the Calvinists: La Perpétuité de la foi catholique touchant l’eucharistie. Ten years later, however, another storm of persecution burst. Arnauld was compelled to fly from France, and take refuge in the Netherlands, finally settling down at Brussels. Here the last sixteen years of his life were spent in incessant controversy with Jesuits, Calvinists and misbelievers of all kinds; here he died on the 8th of August 1694. His inexhaustible energy is best expressed by his famous reply to Nicole, who complained of feeling tired. “Tired!” echoed Arnauld, “when you have all eternity to rest in?” Nor was this energy by any means absorbed by purely theological questions. He was one of the first to adopt the philosophy of Descartes, though with certain orthodox reservations; and between 1683 and 1685 he had a long battle with Malebranche on the relation of theology to metaphysics. On the whole, public opinion leant to Arnauld’s side. When Malebranche complained that his adversary had misunderstood him, Boileau silenced him with the question: “My dear sir, whom do you expect to understand you, if M. Arnauld does not?” And popular regard for Arnauld’s penetration was much increased by his Art de penser, commonly known as the Port-Royal Logic, which has kept its place as an elementary text-book until quite modern times. Lastly a considerable place has quite lately been claimed for Arnauld among the mathematicians of his age; a recent critic even describes him as the Euclid of the 17th century. In general, however, since his death his reputation has been steadily on the wane. Contemporaries admired him chiefly as a master of close and serried reasoning; herein Bossuet, the greatest theologian of the age, was quite at one with d’Aguesseau, the greatest lawyer. But a purely controversial writer is seldom attractive to posterity. Anxiety to drive home every possible point, and cut his adversary off from every possible line of retreat, makes him seem intolerably prolix. “In spite of myself,” Arnauld once said regretfully, “my books are seldom very short.” And even lucidity may prove a snare to those who trust to it alone, and scornfully refuse to appeal to the imagination or the feelings. It is to be feared that, but for his connexion with Pascal, Arnauld’s name would be almost forgotten—or, at most, live only in the famous epitaph Boileau consecrated to his memory—

Au pied de cet autel de structure grossière
Gît sans pompe, enfermé dans une vile bière
Le plus savant mortel qui jamais ait écrit.”

Full details as to the lives and writings of the Arnaulds will be found in the various books mentioned at the close of the article on Port Royal. The most interesting account of Angélique will be found in Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port-Royal (3 vols., Utrecht 1742). Three volumes of her correspondence were also published at the same time and place. There are excellent modern lives of her in English by Miss Frances Martin (Angélique Arnauld, 1873) and by A. K. H. (Angélique of Port Royal, 1905). Antoine Arnauld’s complete works—thirty-seven volumes in forty-two parts—were published in Paris, 1775–1781. No modern biography of him exists; but there is a study of his philosophy in Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne (Paris, 1868); and his mathematical achievements are discussed by Dr Bopp in the 14th volume of the Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der mathematischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig, 1902). The memoirs of Arnauld d’Andilly and of his son, the abbé Arnauld, are reprinted both in Petitot’s and Poujoulat’s collections of memoirs illustrative of the 17th century.  (St. C.) 


ARNAULT, ANTOINE VINCENT (1766–1834), French dramatist, was born in Paris in January 1766. His first play, Marius à Minturnes (1791), immediately established his reputation. A year later he followed up his first success with a second republican tragedy, Lucrèce. He left France during the Terror and on his return was arrested by the revolutionary authorities, but was liberated through the intervention of Fabre d’Eglantine and others. He was commissioned by Bonaparte in 1797 with the reorganization of the Ionian Islands, and was nominated to the Institute and made secretary general of the university. He was faithful to his patron through his misfortunes, and after the Hundred Days remained in exile until 1819. In 1829 he was re-elected to the Academy and became perpetual secretary in 1833. Others of his plays are Blanche et Montcassin, ou les Vénitiens (1798); and Germanicus (1816), the performance of which was the occasion of a disturbance in the parterre which threatened serious political complications. His tragedies are perhaps less known now than his Fables (1813, 1815 and 1826), which are written in very graceful verse. Arnault collaborated in a Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon (1822), and wrote some very interesting Souvenirs d’un sexagénaire (1833), which contain much out-of-the-way information about the history of the years previous to 1804. Arnault died at Goderville on the 16th of September 1834.

His eldest son, Émilien Lucien (1787–1863), wrote several tragedies, the leading rôles in which were interpreted by Talma.

See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. 7. Arnault’s Œuvres complètes (4 vols.) were published at the Hague and Paris in 1818–1819 and again (8 vols.) at Paris in 1824.

ARNDT, ERNST MORITZ (1769–1860), German poet and patriot, was born on the 26th of December 1769 at Schoritz in the island of Rügen, which at that time belonged to Sweden. He was the son of a prosperous farmer, and emancipated serf of the lord of the district, Count Putbus; his mother came of well-to-do German yeoman stock. In 1787 the family removed into the neighbourhood of Stralsund, where Arndt was enabled to attend the academy. After an interval of private study he went in 1791 to the university of Greifswald as a student of theology and history, and in 1793 removed to Jena, where he fell under the influence of Fichte. On the completion of his university course he returned home, was for two years a private tutor in the family of Ludwig Kosegarten (1758–1818), pastor of Wittow and poet, and having qualified for the ministry as a “candidate of theology,” assisted in the church services. At the age of twenty-eight he renounced the ministry, and for eighteen months he led a wandering life, visiting Austria, Hungary, Italy, France and Belgium. Returning homewards up the Rhine, he was moved by the sight of the ruined castles along its banks to intense bitterness against France. The impressions of this journey he later described in Reisen durch einen Theil Teutschlands, Ungarns, Italiens und Frankreichs in den Jahren 1798 und 1799 (1802–1804). In 1800 he settled in Greifswald as privat-docent in history, and the same year published Über die Freiheit der alten Republiken. In 1803 appeared Germanien und Europa, ”a fragmentary ebullition,” as be himself called it, of his views on the French aggression. This was followed by one of the most remarkable of his books, Versuch einer Geschichte der Leibeigenschaft in Pommern und Rügen (Berlin, 1803), a history of serfdom in Pomerania and Rügen, which was so convincing an indictment that King Gustavus Adolphus IV. in 1806 abolished the evil. Arndt had meanwhile risen from privat-docent to extraordinary professor, and in 1806 was appointed to the chair of history at the university. In this year he published the first part of his Geist der Zeit, in which he flung down the gauntlet to Napoleon and called on his countrymen to rise and shake off the French yoke. So great was the excitement it produced that Arndt was compelled to take refuge in Sweden to escape the vengeance of Napoleon. Settling in Stockholm, he obtained government employment, but devoted himself to the great cause which was nearest his heart, and in pamphlets, poems and songs communicated his enthusiasm to his countrymen. Schill’s heroic death at Stralsund impelled him to return to Germany and, under the disguise of “Almann, teacher of languages,” he reached Berlin in December 1809. In 1810 he returned to Greifswald, but only for a few months. He again set out on his adventurous travels, lived in close contact with the first men of his time, such as Blücher, Gneisenau and Stein, and in 1812 was summoned by the last named to St Petersburg to assist in the organization of the final struggle against France. Meanwhile, pamphlet after pamphlet, full of bitter hatred of the French oppressor, came from his pen, and his stirring patriotic songs, such as Was ist das deutsche Vaterland? Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen liess, and Was blasen die Trompeten? were on all lips. When, after the peace, the university of Bonn was founded in 1818, Arndt was appointed to