Georges Maurice de Guérin

He was educated for the church at a religious seminary at Toulouse, and then at the Collége Stanislas, Paris, after which he entered the society at La Chesnaye in Brittany, founded by Lamennais. It was only after great hesitation, and without being satisfied as to his religious vocation, that under the influence of Lamennais he joined the new religious order in the autumn of 1832; and when, in September of the next year, Lamennais, who had come under the displeasure of Rome, severed connexion with the society, Maurice de Guérin soon followed his example.

Early in the following year he went to Paris, where he was for a short time a teacher at the Collége Stanislas. In November 1838 be married a Creole lady of some fortune; but a few months afterwards he was attacked by consumption and died on the 19th of July 1839. In the Revue des deux mondes for May 15, 1840, there appeared a notice of Maurice de Guérin by George Sand, to which she added two fragments of his writings--one a composition in prose entitled the Centaur, and the other a short poem. His Reliquiae (2 vols., 1861), including the Centaur, his journal, a number of his letters and several poems, was edited by GS Trébutien[?], and accompanied with a biographical and critical notice by Sainte-Beuve; a new edition, with the title Journal, lettres et poèmes, followed in 1862; and an English translation of it was published at New York in 1867. His sister Eugénie was a great influence on him and published some of his works after his death.

Though he was essentially a poet, his prose is more striking and original than his poetry. Its peculiar and unique charm arises from his strong and absorbing passion for nature, a passion whose intensity reached almost to adoration and worship, but in which the pagan was more prominent than the moral element. According to Sainte-Beuve, "no French poet or painter has rendered so well the feeling for nature--the feeling not so much for details as for the ensemble and the divine universality, the feeling for the origin. of things and the sovereign. principle of life."

Reference

• This entry incorporates public domain text originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.