serving under Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, he passed several years on the pontoons. His great delight was to go each year, when the conscription was drawn, and humiliate the recruits by relating his experiences as a volunteer. Regarding with contempt those who were drawing lots, he would add: “We used not to act in this way,” and he would shrug his shoulders over the degeneracy of the age.
It is from what I have seen of these excellent sailors, and from what I have read and heard about the peasants of Lithuania, and even of Poland, that I have derived my ideas as to the innate goodness of our races when they are organised after the type of the primitive clan. It is impossible to give an idea of how much goodness and even politeness and gentle manners there is in these ancient Celts. I saw the last traces of it some thirty years ago in the beautiful little island of Brehat, with its patriarchal ways which carried one back to the time of the Pheacians. The unselfishness and the practical incapacity of these good people were beyond conception. One proof of their nobility was that whenever they attempted to engage in any commercial business they were defrauded. Never in the world’s history did people ruin themselves with a lighter or more careless heart, keeping up a running fire of paradox and quips. Never in the world were the laws of common sense and sound economy more joyously trodden under foot. I asked my mother, towards the close of her life, whether it was really the case that all the members of our family whom she had known were upon as bad terms with fortune as those whom I could remember.
“All as poor as Job,” she answered me. “How could it be different? None of them were born rich, and none of them pillaged their neighbours. In those days the only rich people were the clergy and the nobles. There is, however, one exception, I mean A—-, who became a millionaire. Oh! he is a very respectable person, very nearly a member of parliament, and quite likely to become one.”
“How did A—- contrive to make such a large fortune while all his neighbours remained poor?”
“I cannot tell you that…. There are some people who are born to be rich, while there are others who never would be so. The former have claws, and do not scruple to help themselves first. That is just what we have never been able to do. When it comes to taking the best piece out of the dish which is handed round our natural politeness stands in our way. None of your ancestors could make money. They took nothing from the general mass, and would not impoverish their neighbours. Your grandfather would not buy any of the national property, as others did. Your father was like all other sailors, and the proof that he was born to be a sailor and to fight was that he had no head for business. When you were born we were in such a bad way that I took you on my knees and cried bitterly. You see that sailors are not like the rest of the world. I have known many who entered upon a term of service with a good round sum of money in their possession. They would heat the silver pieces in a frying-pan and throw them into the street, splitting their sides with laughter at the crowd which scrambled for them. This was meant to show that it was not for mercenary motives that they were ready to risk their lives, and that honour and duty cannot be posted in a ledger. And then there was your poor uncle Peter. I cannot tell you what trouble he used to give me.”
“Tell me about him,” I said, “for somehow or other I like him very much.”
“You saw him once; he met us near the bridge, and he lifted his hat to you, but you were too much respected in the neighbourhood for him to venture to speak to you, though I did not like to tell you so. He was one of the best-natured creatures in existence, but he could never be got to apply himself to work. He was always lounging about, passing the best part of the day and night in taverns. He was honest and good-hearted withal, but there was no getting him to follow any trade. You have no idea how agreeable he was until the life he led had exhausted him. He was a universal favourite, and with his inexhaustible stock of tales, proverbs, and funny stories, he was welcome everywhere. He was very well read, too, and by no means devoid of learning. He was the oracle of the taverns, and was the life and soul of any party at which he might be present. He effected a regular literary revolution. Heretofore the only books which people cared for were the _Quatre Fils d’Aymon_ and _Renaud de Montauban_. All these ancient characters were familiar to us, and each of us had his or her favourite hero, but Peter taught us more modern tales which he took from books, but which he remodelled to suit the local taste.
“We had at that time a pretty good library. When the mission fathers came to Treguier, during the reign of Charles X., the preacher delivered such an eloquent sermon against dangerous books that we all of us burnt any such volumes as we had. The missionary had told us that it was better to burn too many than too few, and that, for the matter of that, all books might under certain conditions be dangerous. I did like the rest of the people, but your father put several upon the top of the large wardrobe, saying that they were too handsome to be burnt; they were _Don Quixotte, Gil Bias_, and the _Diable Boiteux_. Peter found them there, and would read them to the common people and to the men employed in the port. And so the whole of our library disappeared. In this way he spent the modest little fortune which he possessed, and became a regular vagabond, though in spite of this he remained kind and generous, incapable of harming a worm.”
“But,” I rejoined, “why did not his friends send him to sea? that would have made him more regular in his ways.”
“That could never have been, for he was so popular that all his friends would have run after him and fetched him back. You have no idea how full of fun he was. Poor Peter! with all his faults I could not help liking him, for he was charming at times. He could set you off into a fit of laughter with a word. He had a knack of his own for springing a joke upon you in the most unexpected way. I shall never forget the evening when they came to tell me that he had been found dead on the road to Langoat. I went and had him properly laid out. He was buried, and the priest spoke in consoling terms about the death of these poor waifs whose heart is not always so far from God as some people may imagine.”
Poor Uncle Pierre! I have often thought of him. This tardy esteem will be his sole recompense. The metaphysical paradise would be no place for him. His lively imagination, his high spirits, and his keen sense of enjoyment constituted him for a distinct individualism in his own sphere. My father’s character was just the opposite, for he was inclined to be sentimental and melancholy. It was when he was advanced in years and upon his return from a long voyage that he gave me birth. In the early dawn of my existence I felt, the cold sea mist, shivered under the cutting morning blast and passed my bitter and gloomy watch on the quarter-deck.
GOOD MASTER SYSTEME.
PART I.
I was related on my maternal grandmother’s side to a much more prim class of people. My grandmother was a very good specimen of the middle-classes of former days. She had been excessively pretty. I can remember her towards the close of her life, and she was always dressed in the fashion which prevailed at the time of her being left a widow. She was very particular about her class, never altered her head-dress, and would not allow herself to be addressed except as “Mademoiselle.” The ladies of noble birth had a great respect for her. When they met my sister Henrietta they used to kiss her and say, “My dear, your grandmother was a very respectable person, we were very fond of her. Try to be like her.” And as it happened my sister did like her very much and took her as a pattern, but my mother, always laughing and full of wit, differed from her very much. Mother and daughter were in all respects a marked contrast.
The worthy burghers of Lannion and their families were models of simplicity, honour, and respectability. Several of my aunts never married, but they were very light-spirited and cheerful, thanks to the innocence of their hearts. Families dwelt together in unity, animated by the same simple faith. My aunts’ sole amusement on Sundays after mass was to send a feather up into the air, each blowing at it in turn to prevent it from falling to the ground. This afforded them amusement enough to last until the following Sunday. The piety of my grandmother, her urbanity, her regard for the established order of things are graven in my heart as the best pictures of that old-fashioned society based upon God and the king–two props for which it may not be easy to find substitutes.
When the Revolution broke out my grandmother was horror-struck, and she took the lead with so many other pious persons in hiding the priests who had refused to take the oath of fidelity to the Constitution. Mass was celebrated in her drawing-room, and as the ladies of the nobility had emigrated she thought it her duty to take their place. Most of my uncles, on the other hand were ardent patriots. When any public misfortune occurred, such, for instance, as the treason of Dumouriez, my uncles allowed their beards to grow and went about with long faces, flowing cravats, and untidy garments. My grandmother would at these times indulge in delicate but rather risky satire. “My dear Tanneguy, what is the matter with you? Has any trouble befallen us? Has anything happened to Cousin Amelie? Is my Aunt Augustine’s asthma worse?”–“No, cousin, the Republic is in danger.”–“Oh, is that all, my dear Tanneguy? I am so glad to hear you say so. You quite relieve me.” Thus she sported for two years with the guillotine, and it is a wonder that she escaped it. A lady named Taupin, pious like herself, was associated with her in these good works. The priests were sheltered by turns in her house and in that of Madame Taupin. My uncle Y—-, a very sturdy Revolutionist, but a good-hearted man at bottom, often said to her: “My cousin, if it came to my knowledge that there were priests or aristocrats concealed in your house, I should be obliged to denounce you.” She always used to reply that her only acquaintances were true friends of the Republic and no mistake about it.
So it was that Madame Taupin was the one to be guillotined. My mother never related this incident to me without being very deeply moved. She showed me when I was a child the spot where the tragedy was enacted. Upon the day of the execution, my grandmother went, with all her family, out of Lannion, so as not to participate in the crime which was about to be committed. She went before daybreak to a chapel, situated rather more than a mile from the town in a retired spot and dedicated to St. Roch. Several pious persons had arranged to meet there, and a signal was to let them know just when the knife was about to drop so that they might all be in prayer when the soul of the martyr was, brought by the angels before the throne of the Most High.
All this bound people together more closely than we can form any idea of. My grandmother loved the priests and believed in their courage and devotion to duty. She was destined to meet with a very cool reception from one of them. When during the Consulate religious worship was re-established, the priest whom she had sheltered at the risk of her life was appointed incumbent of a parish near Lannion. She took my mother, then quite a child, with her, and they walked the five miles under a scorching sun. The thought of meeting again one whom she had seen keeping the night watch at her house under such tragical circumstances made her heart beat fast. The priest, whether from sacerdotal pride or from a feeling of duty, behaved in a very strange manner. He scarcely seemed to recognise her, never asked her to be seated, and dismissed her with a few short remarks. Not a word of thanks or an allusion to the past. He did not even offer her a glass of water. My grandmother could scarcely keep from fainting; and she returned to Lannion in tears, whether because she reproached herself for some feminine error of the heart or because she was hurt by so much pride. My mother never knew whether in after years she looked back to this incident with the more of injured pride or of admiration. Perhaps, she came at last to recognise the infinite wisdom of the priest, who seemed to say to her, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” and who would not admit that he had any reason to be grateful to her. It is difficult for women to comprehend this abstract feeling. Their work, whatever it may be, has always a personal object in view, and it would be hard to make them believe it natural that people should fight shoulder to shoulder without knowing and liking one another.
My mother, with her frank, cheerful, and inquisitive ways, was rather partial to the Revolution than the reverse. Unknown to my grandmother she used to go and hear the patriotic songs. The _Chant du Depart_ made a great impression upon her, and when she repeated the stirring line put in the mouth of the mothers,
“De nos yeux maternels ne craignez point de larmes,”
her voice was always broken. These stirring and terrible scenes had imprinted themselves for ever upon her mind. When she began to go back over these recollections, indissolubly bound up with the days of her girlhood, when she remembered how enthusiasm and wild delight alternated with scenes of terror, her whole life seemed to rise up before her I learnt from her to be so proud of the Revolution that I have liked it since, in spite of my reason and of all that I have said against it. I do not withdraw anything that I have already said; but when I see the inveterate persistency of foreign writers to try and prove that the French Revolution was one long story of folly and shame, and that it is but an unimportant factor in the world’s history, I begin to think that it is perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, inasmuch as other people are so jealous of it.
GOOD MASTER SYSTEME.
PART II.
Among those whom I have to thank for being more a son of the Revolution than of the Crusaders was a singular character who was long a puzzle to us. He was an elderly man, whose mode of life, ideas, and habits were in striking contrast with those of the country at large. I used to see him every day, with his threadbare cloak, going to buy a pennyworth of milk which the girl who sold it poured into the tin he brought with him. He was poor without being literally in want. He never spoke to any one, but he had a very gentle look about the eyes, and those who had happened to be brought into contact with him spoke in very eulogistic terms of his amiability and good sense. I never knew his name, and I do not believe that any one else did. He did not belong to our part of the country, and he had no relations. He was allowed to go his own way, and his singular mode of life excited no other feeling than one of surprise; but it had not always been so. He had passed through many vicissitudes. At one time he had been in communication with the people of the place and had imparted some of his ideas to them; but no one understood what he meant. The word _system_ which he used several times tickled their fancy, and this nickname was at once applied to him. If he had gone on imparting his ideas he would have got himself into trouble, and the children would have pelted him. Like a wise man he kept his tongue between his teeth, and no one attempted to molest him. He came out every day to make his modest purchases, and of an evening he would take a walk in some unfrequented spot. He was of a serious but not melancholy cast of countenance, and with more of an amiable than morose expression. Later in life when I read Colerus’s _Life of Spinoza_, I at once saw that as a child I had had before my eyes the very image of the holy man of Amsterdam. He was left to follow his own courses, and was even treated with respect. His resigned and affable airs seemed like a glimpse from another world. People did not understand him, but they felt that he possessed higher qualities to which they paid implicit homage.
He never went to church, and avoided any occasion of having to make external display of religious belief. The clergy were very unfavourable to him and though they did not denounce him from the pulpit, as he had never given any cause for scandal, his name was always mentioned with repugnance. A peculiar incident occurred to fan this animosity into a flame, and to involve the aged recluse in an atmosphere of ghostly terror. He possessed a very large library, consisting of works belonging to the eighteenth century. All those philosophical treatises which have exercised a wider influence than Luther and Calvin were to be found in it, and the old bookworm knew them by heart, and eked out a living by lending them to some of his neighbours. The clergy looked upon this as the abomination of desolation, and strictly forbade their flocks to borrow these books. System’s lodging was looked upon as a receptacle for every kind of impiety.
I, as a matter of course, looked upon him and his books in the same light, and it was only when my ideas upon philosophy were well consolidated that I came to understand that I had been fortunate enough during my youth to contemplate a truly wise man. I had no difficulty in reconstructing his ideas by piecing together a few words which at the time had appeared to me unintelligible, but which I had remembered. God, in his eyes, was the order of nature, from which all things proceed, and he would not brook contradiction upon this point. He loved humanity as representing reason, and he hated superstition as the negation of reason. Although he had not the poetic afflatus which the nineteenth century has given to these great truths, System, I feel sure, had very high and far-reaching views. He was quite in the right. So far from failing to appreciate the greatness of God, he looked with contempt upon those who believed that they could move Him. Lost in profound tranquillity and unaffected humility, he saw that human error was more to be pitied than hated. It was evident that he despised his age. The revival of superstition, which, he thought, had been buried by Voltaire and Rousseau, seemed to him a sign of utter imbecility in the rising generation.
He was found dead one morning in his humble room, with his books and papers littered all about him. This was soon after the Revolution of 1830, and the mayor had him decently interred at night. The clergy purchased the whole of his library at a nominal price and made away with it. No papers were found which served to elucidate the mystery which had always surrounded him, but in the corner of one drawer was found a packet containing some faded flowers tied up with a tricoloured ribbon. At first this was supposed to be some love-token, and several people built upon this foundation a romantic biography of the deceased recluse, but the tricolour ribbon tended to discredit this version. My mother never believed that it was the correct one. Although she had an instinctive feeling of respect for System, she always said to me: “I am sure that he was one of the Terrorists. I sometimes fancy that I remember seeing him in 1793. Besides, he has all the ways and ideas of M—-, who terrorised Lannion and kept the guillotine in constant play there during the time that Robespierre had the upper hand.” Fifteen or twenty years ago, I read the following paragraph in a newspaper:
“There died yesterday, almost suddenly, in an unfrequented street of the Faubourg St. Jacques, an old man whose way of living was a constant source of gossip in the neighbourhood. He was respected in the parish as a model of charity and kindness, but he was careful to avoid any allusion to his past. A few works, such as Volney’s _Catechism_, and odd volumes of Rousseau, were scattered about the table. All his property consisted of a trunk, which, when opened by the Commissary of Police, was found to contain only a few clothes and a faded bouquet carefully wrapped up in a piece of paper on which was written: ‘Bouquet which I wore at the festival of the Supreme Being, 20 Prairial, year II.'”
This explained the whole thing to me. I remembered how the few disciples of the Jacobite School whom I had known were ardently attached to the recollections of 1793-94 and incapable of dwelling upon anything else. The twelvemonths’ dream was so vivid that those who had experienced it could not come back to real life. They were ever haunted by the same sinister fancy; they had a _delirium tremens_ of blood. They were uncompromising in their belief, and the world at large, which no longer pitched its note to their cry, seemed idle and empty in their eyes. Left standing alone like the survivors of a world of giants, loaded with the opprobrium of the human race, they could hold no sort of communion with the living. I could quite understand the effect which Lakanal must have produced when he returned from America in 1833 and appeared among his colleagues of the _Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques_ like a phantom. I could understand Daunou looking upon M. Cousin and M. Guizot as dangerous Jesuits. By a not uncommon contrast these survivors of the fierce struggles and combats of the Revolution had become as gentle as lambs. Man, to be kind, need not necessarily have a logical basis for his kindness. The most cruel of the Inquisitors of the middle ages, Conrad of Marburg for instance, were the kindest of men. This we see in _Torquemada_, where the genius of Victor Hugo shows us how a man may send his fellows to the stake out of charity and sentimentalism.
LITTLE NOEMI.
PART I.
Although the religious and too premature sacerdotal education which I had received prevented me from being on any intimate terms with young people of the other sex, I had several little girl-friends one of whom more particularly has left a profound impression upon me. From an early age I preferred the society of girls to boys, and the latter did not like me, as I was too effeminate for them. We could not play together, as they called me “Mademoiselle,” and teased me in a variety of ways. On the other hand, I got on very well with girls of my own age, and they found me very sensible and steady. I was about twelve or thirteen, and I could not account for the preference. The vague idea which attracted me to them was, I think, that men are at liberty to do many things which women cannot, and the latter consequently had, in my eyes, the charm of being weak and beautiful creatures, subject in their daily life to rules of conduct which they did not attempt to override. All those whom I had known were the pattern of modesty. The first feeling which stirred in me was one of pity, so to speak, coupled with the idea of assisting them in their becoming resignation, of liking them for their reserve, and making it easier for them. I quite felt my own intellectual superiority; but even at that early age, I felt that the woman who is very beautiful or very good, solves completely the problem of which we, with all our hard-headedness, make such a hash. We are mere children or pedants compared to her. I as yet understood this only vaguely, though I saw clearly enough that beauty is so great a gift that talent, genius, and even virtue are nothing when weighed in the balance with it; so that the woman who is really beautiful has the right to hold herself superior to everybody and everything, inasmuch as she combines not in a creation outside of herself, but in her very person, as in a Myrrhine vase, all the qualities which genius painfully endeavours to reproduce.
Among these, my companions, there was, as I have said, one to whom I was particularly attached Her name was Noemi, and she was quite a model of good conduct and grace. Her eyes had a languid look which denoted at once good-nature and quickness; her hair was beautifully fair. She was about two years my senior, and she treated me partly as an elder sister, partly with the confidential affection of one child for another. We got on very well together, and while our friends were constantly falling out, we were always of one mind. I tried to make these quarrels up, but she never thought that I should be successful, and would tell me that it was hopeless to try and make everybody agree. These attempts at mediation, which gave us an imperceptible superiority over the other children, formed a very pleasing tie between us. Even now I cannot hear “_Nous n’irons plus an bois_,” or “_Il pleut, il pleut, bergere_” without my heart beating rather more quickly than is its wont. There can be no doubt that but for the fatal vice which held me fast, I should have been in love with Noemi two or three years later; but I was a slave to reasoning, and my whole time was devoted to religious dialectics. The flow of abstractions which rushed to the head made me giddy, and caused me to be absent-minded and oblivious of all else.
This budding affection was, moreover, turned from its course by a peculiar defect which, has more than once been injurious to my prospects in life. This is my indecision of character, which often leads me into positions from which I have great difficulty in extricating myself. This defect was further complicated in this particular case by a good quality which has led me into as many difficulties as the most serious of defects. There was among these children a little girl though much less pretty than Noemi, who, gentle and amiable as she was, did not get nearly so much notice taken of her. She was even fonder of making me her companion than Noemi, of whom she was rather jealous. I have never been able to do a thing which would give pain to any one. I had a vague sort of idea that a woman who was not very pretty must be unhappy and feel the inward pang of having missed her fate. I was oftener, therefore, with her than with Noemi, because I saw that she was melancholy. So I allowed my first love to go off at a tangent, just as, later in life, I did in politics, and in a very bungling sort of way. Once or twice I noticed Noemi laughing to herself at my simple folly. She was always nice with me, but at times her manner was slightly sarcastic, and this tinge of irony, which she made no attempt to conceal, only rendered her more charming in my eyes.
The struggles amid which I grew to manhood nearly effaced her from my memory. In after years I often fancied that I could see her again, and one day I asked my mother what had become of her. “She is dead,” my mother replied, “and of a broken heart. She had no fortune of her own. When she lost her father and mother, her aunt–a very respectable woman who kept the equally respectable Hotel —-, took her to live there. She did the best she could. Even as a child, when you knew her, she was charming, but at two-and-twenty she was marvellously beautiful. Her hair–which she tried in vain to keep out of sight under a heavy cap–came down over her neck in wavy tresses like handfuls of ripe wheat. She did all that she could to conceal her beauty. Her beautiful figure was disguised by a cape, and her long white hands were always covered with mittens. But it was all of no use. Groups of young men would assemble in church to see her at her devotions. She was too beautiful for our country, and she was as good as she was beautiful.” My mother’s story touched me very much. I have thought of her much more frequently since, and when it pleased God to give me a daughter I named her Noemi.
LITTLE NOEMI.
PART II.
The world in its progress cares little more how many it crushes than the car of the idol of Juggernaut. The whole of the ancient society which I have endeavoured to portray has disappeared. Brehat has passed out of existence. I revisited it six years ago and should not have known it again. Some genius in the capital of the department has discovered that certain ancient usages of the island are not in keeping with some article of the code, and a peaceable and well-to-do population has been reduced to revolt and beggary. These islands and coasts which were formerly such a good nursery for the navy are so no longer. The railways and the steamers have been the ruin of them. And like old Breton bards, to what a case they have been brought! I found several of them a few years ago among the Bas-Bretons who came to eke out a miserable existence at St. Malo. One of them, who was employed in sweeping the streets, came to see me. He explained to me in Breton–for he could not speak a word of French–his ideas as to the decadence of all poetry and the inferiority of the new schools. He was attached to the old style–the narrative ballad–and he began to sing to me the one which he deemed the prettiest of them. The subject of it was the death of Louis XVI. He burst into tears, and when he got to Santerre’s beating of the drums he could not continue. Rising proudly to his feet, he said: “If the king could have spoken, the spectators would have rallied to him.” Poor dear man!
With all these instances before me the case of the wealthy M.A., seemed to me all the more singular. When I asked my mother to explain it to me, she always evaded an answer and spoke vaguely of adventures on the coast of Madagascar. Upon one occasion, I pressed her more closely and asked her how it was that the coasting trade, at which no one had ever made money, could have made a millionaire of him. “How obstinate you are, Ernest,” she replied. “I have often told you not to ask me that! Z—- is the only person in our circle who has any pretensions to polish; he is in a good position; he is rich and respected; there is no need to ask him how he made his money.” “Tell me all the same.” “Well if you must know, and as people cannot get rich without soiling their fingers more or less, he was in the slave trade.”
A noble people, fit only to serve nobles, and in harmony of ideas with them, is in our day at the very antipodes of sound political economy, and is bound to die of starvation. Persons of delicate ideas, who are hampered by honourable scruples of one kind and another, stand no chance with the matter-of-fact competitors who are the men not to let slip any advantage in the battle of life. I soon found this out when I began to know something of the planet in which we live, and hence there arose within me a struggle or rather a dualism which has been the secret of all my opinions. I did not in any way lose my fondness for the ideal; it still is and always will be implanted in me as strongly as ever. The most trifling act of goodness, the least spark of talent, are in my eyes infinitely superior to all riches and worldly achievements. But as I had a well-balanced mind I saw that the ideal and reality have nothing in common; that the world is, at all events for the time, given over to what is commonplace and paltry; that the cause which generous souls will embrace is sure to be the losing one; and that what men of refined intellect hold to be true in literature and poetry is always wrong in the dull world of accomplished facts. The events which followed the Revolution of 1848 confirmed all their ideas. It turned out that the most alluring dreams, when carried into the domain of facts, were mischievous to the last degree, and that the affairs of the world were never so well managed as when the idealists had no part or lot in them. From that time I accustomed myself to follow a very singular course: that is to shape my practical judgments in direct opposition to my theoretical judgments, and to regard as possible that which was in contradiction with my desires. A somewhat lengthy experience had shown me that the cause I sympathised with always failed and that the one which I decried was certain to be triumphant. The lamer a political solution was, the brighter appeared to me its prospect of being accepted In the world of realities.
In fine, I only care for characters of an absolute idealism: martyrs, heroes, utopists, friends of the impossible. They are the only persons in whom I interest myself; they are, if I may be permitted to say so, my specialty. But I see what those whose imagination runs away with them fail to see, viz., that these flights of fancy are no longer of any use and that for a long time to come the heroic follies which were deified in the past will fall flat. The enthusiasm of 1792 was a great and noble outburst, but it was one of those things which will not recur. Jacobinism, as M. Thiers has clearly shown, was the salvation of France; now it would be her ruin. The events of 1870 have by no means cured me of my pessimism. They taught me the high value of evil, and that the cynical disavowal of all sentiment, generosity and chivalry gives pleasure to the world at large and is invariably successful. Egotism is the exact opposite of what I had been accustomed to regard as noble and good. We see that in this world egotism alone commands success. England has until within the last few years been the first nation in the world because she was the most selfish. Germany has acquired the hegemony of the world by repudiating without scruple the principles of political morality which she once so eloquently preached.
This is the explanation of the anomaly that having on several occasions been called upon to give practical advice in regard to the affairs of my country, this advice has always been in direct contradiction with my artistic views. In so doing, I have been actuated by conscientious motives. I have endeavoured to evade the ordinary cause of my errors; I have taken the counterpart of my instincts and been on guard against my idealism. I am always afraid that my mode of thought will lead me wrong and blind me to one side of the question. This is how it is that, much as I love what is good, I am perhaps over indulgent for those who have taken another view of life, and that, while always being full of work, I ask myself very often whether the idlers are not right after all.
So far as regards enthusiasm, I have got as much of it as any one; but I believe that the reality will have none of it, and that with the reign of men of business, manufacturers, the working class (which is the most selfish of all), Jews, English of the old school and Germans of the new school, has been ushered in a materialist age in which it will be as difficult to bring about the triumph of a generous idea as to produce the silvery note of the great bell of Notre Dame with one cast in lead or tin. It is strange, moreover, that while not pleasing one side I have not deceived the other. The bourgeois have not been the least grateful to me for my concessions; they have read me better than I can read-myself, and they have seen that I was but a poor sort of Conservative, and that without the most remote intention of acting in bad faith, I should have played them false twenty times over out of affection for the ideal, my ancient mistress. They felt that the hard things which I said to her were only superficial, and that I should be unable to resist the first smile which she might bestow upon me.
We must create the heavenly kingdom, that is the ideal one, within ourselves. The time is past for the creation of miniature worlds, refined Thelemes, based upon mutual affection and esteem; but life, well understood and well lived, in a small circle of persons who can appreciate one another, brings its own reward. Communion of spirit is the greatest and the only reality. This is why my thoughts revert so willingly to those worthy priests who were my first masters, to the honest sailors who lived only to do their duty, to little Noemi who died because she was too beautiful, to my grandfather who would not buy the national property, and to good Master Systeme, who was happy inasmuch as he had his hour of illusion. Happiness consists in devotion to a dream or to a duty; self-sacrifice is the surest means of securing repose. One of the early Buddhas who preceded Sakya-Mouni obtained the _nirvana_ in a singular way. He saw one day a falcon chasing a little bird. “I beseech thee,” he said to the bird of prey, “leave this little creature in peace; I will give thee its weight from my own flesh.” A small pair of scales descended from the heavens, and the transaction was carried out. The little bird settled itself upon one side of the scales, and the saint placed in the other platter a good slice of his flesh, but the beam did not move. Bit by bit the whole of his body went into the scales, but still the scales were motionless. Just as the last shred of the holy man’s body touched the scale the beam fell, the little bird flew away and the saint entered into _nirvana_. The falcon, who had not, all said and done, made a bad bargain, gorged itself on his flesh.
The little bird represents the unconsidered trifles of beauty and innocence which our poor planet, worn out as it may be, will ever contain. The falcon represents the far larger proportion of egotism and gross appetites which make up the sum of humanity. The wise man purchases the free enjoyment of what is good and noble by making over his flesh to the greedy, who, while engrossed by this material feast, leave him and the free objects of his fancy in peace. The scales coming down from above represent fatality, which is not to be moved, and which will not accept a partial sacrifice; but from which, by a total abnegation of self, by casting it a prey, we can escape, as it then has no further hold upon us. The falcon, for its part is content when virtue, by the sacrifices which she makes, secures for it greater advantages than it could obtain by the force of its own claws. Desiring a profit from virtue, its interest is that virtue should exist; and so the wise man, by the surrender of his material privileges, attains his one aim, which is to secure free enjoyment of the ideal.
THE PETTY SEMINARY OF SAINT NICHOLAS DU CHARDONNET.
PART I.
Many persons who allow that I have a perspicuous mind wonder how I came during my boyhood and youth to put faith in creeds, the impossibility of which has since been so clearly revealed to me. Nothing, however, can be more simple, and it is very probable that if an extraneous incident had not suddenly taken me from the honest but narrow-minded associations amid which my youth was passed, I should have preserved all my life long the faith which in the beginning appeared to me as the absolute expression of the truth. I have said how I was educated in a small school kept by some honest priests, who taught me Latin after the old fashion (which was the right one), that is to say to read out of trumpery primers, without method and almost without grammer, as Erasmus and the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, who are the best Latin scholars since the days of old, used to learn it. These worthy priests were patterns of all that is good. Devoid of anything like _pedagogy_, to use the modern phrase, they followed the first rule of education, which is not to make too easy the tasks which have for their aim the mastering of a difficulty. Their main object was to make their pupils into honourable men. Their lessons of goodness and morality, which impressed me as being the literal embodiments of virtue and high feeling, were part and parcel of the dogma which they taught. The historical education they had given me consisted solely in reading Rollin. Of criticism, the natural sciences, and philosophy I as yet knew nothing of course. Of all that concerned the nineteenth century, and the new ideas as to history and literature expounded by so many gifted thinkers, my teachers knew nothing. It was impossible to imagine a more complete isolation from the ambient air. A thorough-paced Legitimist would not even admit the possibility of the Revolution or of Napoleon being mentioned except with a shudder. My only knowledge of the Empire was derived from the lodge-keeper of the school. He had in his room several popular prints. “Look at Bonaparte,” he said to me one day, pointing to one of these, “he was a patriot, he was!” No allusion was ever made to contemporary literature, and the literature of France terminated with Abbe Delille. They had heard of Chateaubriand, but, with a truer instinct than that of the would-be Neo-Catholics, whose heads are crammed with all sorts of delusions, they mistrusted him. A Tertullian enlivening his Apologeticum with _Atala_ and _Rene_ was not calculated to command their confidence. Lamartine perplexed them more sorely still; they guessed that his religious faith was not built on very strong foundations, and they foresaw his subsequent falling away. This gift of observation did credit to their orthodox sagacity, but the result was that the horizon of their pupils was a very narrow one. Rollin’s _Traite des Etudes_ is a work full of large-minded views compared to the circle of pious mediocrity within which they felt it their duty to confine themselves.
Thus the education which I received in the years following the Revolution of 1830 was the same as that which was imparted by the strictest of religious sects two centuries ago. It was none the worse for that, being the same forcible mode of teaching, distinctively religious, but not in the least Jesuitical, under which the youth of ancient France had studied, and which gave so serious and so Christian a turn to the mind. Educated by teachers who had inherited the qualities of Port Royal, minus their heresy, but minus also their power over the pen, I may claim forgiveness for having, at the age of twelve or fifteen, admitted the truth of Christianity like any pupil of Nicole or M. Hermant. My state of mind was very much that of so many clever men of the seventeenth century, who put religion beyond the reach of doubt, though this did not prevent them having very clear ideas upon all other topics. I afterwards learnt facts which caused me to abandon my Christian beliefs, but they must be profoundly ignorant of history and of human intelligence who do not understand how strong a hold the simple and honest discipline of the priests took upon the more gifted of their students. The basis of this primitive form of education was the strictest morality, which they inculated as inseparable from religious practice, and they made us regard the possession of life as implying duties towards truth. The very effort to shake off opinions, in some respects unreasonable, had its advantages. Because a Paris flibbertigibbet disposes with a joke of creeds, from which Pascal, with all his reasoning powers, could not shake himself free, it must not be concluded that the Gavroche is superior to Pascal. I confess that I at times feel humiliated to think that it cost me five or six years of arduous research, and the study of Hebrew, the Semitic languages, Gesenius, and Ewald to arrive at the result which this urchin achieves in a twinkling. These pilings of Pelion upon Ossa seem to me, when looked at in this light, a mere waste of time. But Pere Hardouin observed that he had not got up at four o’clock every morning for forty years to think as all the world thought. So I am loth to admit that I have been at so much pains to fight a mere _chimaera bombinans_. No, I cannot think that my labours have been all in vain, nor that victory is to be won in theology as cheaply as the scoffers would have us believe. There are, in reality, but few people who have a right not to believe in Christianity. If the great mass of people only knew how strong is the net woven by the theologians, how difficult it is to break the threads of it, how much erudition has been spent upon it, and what a power of criticism is required to unravel it all…. I have noticed that some men of talent who have set themselves too late in life the task have been taken in the toils and have not been able to extricate themselves.
My tutors taught me something which was infinitely more valuable than criticism or philosophic wisdom; they taught me to love truth, to respect reason, and to see the serious side of life. This is the only part in me which has never changed. I left their care with my moral sense so well prepared to stand any test, that this precious jewel passed uninjured through the crucible of Parisian frivolity. I was so well prepared for the good and for the true that I could not possibly have followed a career which was not devoted to the things of the mind. My teachers rendered me so unfit for any secular work that I was perforce embarked upon a spiritual career. The intellectual life was the only noble one in my eyes; and mercenary cares seemed to me servile and unworthy.
I have never departed from the sound and wholesome programme which my masters sketched out for me. I no longer believe Christianity to be the supernatural summary of all that man can know; but I still believe that life is the most frivolous of things, unless it is regarded as one great and constant duty. Oh! my beloved old teachers, now nearly all with the departed, whose image often rises before me in my dreams, not as a reproach but as a grateful memory, I have not been so unfaithful to you as you believe! Yes, I have said that your history was very short measure, that your critique had no existence, and that your natural philosophy fell far short of that which leads us to accept as a fundamental dogma: “There is no special supernatural;” but in the main I am still your disciple. Life is only of value by devotion to what is true and good. Your conception of what is good was too narrow; your view of truth too material and too concrete, but you were, upon the whole, in the right, and I thank you for having inculcated in me like a second nature the principle, fatal to worldly success but prolific of happiness, that the aim of a life worth living should be ideal and unselfish.
Most of my fellow-students were brawny and high-spirited young peasants from the neighbourhood of Treguier, and, like most individuals occupying an inferior place in the scale of civilization, they were inclined to air an exaggerated regard for bodily strength, and to show a certain amount of contempt for women and for anything which they considered effeminate. Most of them were preparing for the priesthood. My experiences of that time put me in a very good position for understanding the historical phenomena, which occur when a vigorous barbarism first comes into contact with civilization. I can quite easily understand the intellectual condition of the Germans at the Carlovingian epoch, the psychological and literary condition of a Saxo Grammaticus and a Hrabanus Maurus. Latin had a very singular effect upon their rugged natures, and they were like mastodons going in for a degree. They took everything as serious as the Laplanders do when you give them the Bible to read. We exchanged with regard to Sallust and Livy, impressions which must have resembled those of the disciples of St. Gall or St. Colomb when they were learning Latin. We decided that Caesar was not a great man because he was not virtuous, our philosophy of history was as artless and childlike as might have been that of the Heruli.
The morals of all these young people, left entirely to themselves and with no one to look after them, were irreproachable. There were very few boarders at the Treguier College just then. Most of the students who did not belong to the town boarded in private houses, and their parents used to bring them in on market day their provisions for the week. I remember one of these houses, close to our own, in which several of my fellow-students lodged. The mistress of it, who was an indefatigable housewife, died, and her husband, who at the best of times was no genius, drowned what little he had in the cider-cup every evening. A little servant-maid, who was wonderfully intelligent, took the whole burden upon her shoulders. The young students determined to help her, and so the house went on despite the old tippler. I always heard my comrades speak very highly of this little servant, who was a model of virtue and who was gifted, moreover, with a very pleasing face.
The fact is that, according to my experience, all the allegations against the morality of the clergy are devoid of foundation. I passed thirteen years of my life under the charge of priests, and I never saw anything approaching to a scandal; all the priests I have known have been good men. Confession may possibly be productive of evil in some countries, but I never saw anything of the sort during my ecclesiastical experience. The old-fashioned book which I used for making my examinations of conscience was innocence itself. There was only one sin which excited my curiosity and made me feel uneasy. I was afraid that I might have been guilty of it unawares. I mustered up courage enough, one day, to ask my confessor what was meant by the phrase: “To be guilty of simony in the collation of benefices.” The good priest reassured me and told me that I could not have committed that sin.
Persuaded by my teachers of two absolute truths, the first, that no one who has any respect for himself can engage in any work that is not ideal–and that all the rest is secondary, of no importance, not to say shameful, _ignominia seculi_–and the second, that Christianity embodies everything which is ideal, I could not do otherwise than regard myself as destined for the priesthood. This thought was not the result of reflection, impulse, or reasoning. It came so to speak, of itself. The possibility of a lay career never so much as occurred to me. Having adopted with the utmost seriousness and docility the principles of my teachers, and having brought myself to consider all commercial and mercenary pursuits as inferior and degrading, and only fit for those who had failed in their studies, it was only natural that I should wish to be what they were. They were my patterns in life, and my sole ambition was to be like them, professor at the College of Treguier, poor, exempt from all material cares, esteemed and respected like them.
Not but what the instincts which in after years led me away from these paths of peace already existed within me; but they were dormant. From the accident of my birth I was torn by conflicting forces. There was some Basque and Bordeaux blood in my mother’s family, and unknown to me the Gascon half of myself played all sorts of tricks with the Breton half. Even my family was divided, my father, my grandfather, and my uncles being, as I have already said, the reverse of clerical, while my maternal grandmother was the centre of a society which knew no distinction between royalism and religion. I recently found among some old papers a letter from my grandmother addressed to an estimable maiden lady named Guyon, who used to spoil me very much when I was a child, and who was then suffering from a dreadful cancer.
TREGUIER, _March_ 19, 1831.
“Though two months have elapsed since Natalie informed me of your departure for Treglamus, this is the first time I have had a few moments to myself to write and tell you, my dear friend, how deeply I sympathise with you in your sad position. Your sufferings go to my heart, and nothing but the most urgent necessity has prevented me from writing to you before. The death of a nephew, the eldest son of my defunct sister, plunged us into great sorrow. A few days later, poor little Ernest, son of my eldest daughter, and a brother of Henriette, the boy whom, you were so fond of and who has not forgotten you, fell ill. For forty days he was hanging between life and death, and we have now reached the fifty-fifth day of his illness and still he does not make much progress towards his recovery. He is pretty well in the day time, but his nights are very bad. From ten in the evening to five or six in the morning, he is feverish and half-delirious. I have said enough to excuse myself in the eyes of one who is so kind-hearted and who will forgive me. How I wish I was by your side to repay you the attention you bestowed on me with so much zeal and benevolence. My great grief is to be unable to help you.
“_March 20th_.
“I was sent for to the bedside of my dear little grandson, and I was obliged to break off my conversation with you, which I now resume, my dear friend, to exhort you to put all your trust in God. It is He who afflicts us, but He consoles us with the hope of a reward far beyond what we suffer. Let us be of good cheer; our pains and our sorrows do not last long, and the reward is eternal.
“Dear Natalie tells me how patient and resigned you are amid the most cruel sufferings. That is quite in keeping with your high feelings. She says that never a complaint comes from you however keen your pain. How pleasing you are in God’s sight by your patience and resignation to His heavenly will. He afflicts you, but those whom He loveth He chasteneth. What joy can be compared to that which God’s love gives? I send you _L’Ame sur le Calvaire_, which will furnish you with much consolation in the example of a God who suffered and died for us. Madame D—- will be so kind, I am sure, as to read you a chapter of it every day, if you cannot read yourself. Give her my kindest regards, and beg her to write and tell me how you are going on, and how she is herself. If you will not think me troublesome I will write to you more frequently. Good-bye, my dear friend. May God pour upon you His grace and blessing. Be patient and of good cheer.
“Your ever devoted friend,
“WIDOW….”
“In taking the Communion to-day my prayers were specially for you. My daughter, Henriette, and Ernest, who has passed a much better night, beg to be remembered, as also does Clara. We often talk of you. Let me know how you are, I beg of you. When you have read _L’Ame sur le Calvaire_ you can send it back to me, and I will let you have _L’Esprit Consolateur_.”
The letter and the books were never sent, for my mother, who was to have forwarded them, learnt that Mademoiselle Guyon had died. Some of the consolatory remarks which the letter contains may seem very trite, but are there any better ones to offer a person afflicted with cancer? They are, at all events, as good as laudanum. As a matter of fact the Revolution had left no impress upon the people among whom I lived. The religious ideas of the people were not touched; the congregations came together again, and the nuns of the old orders, converted into schoolmistresses, imparted to women the same education as before. Thus my sister’s first mistress was an old Ursuline nun, who was very fond of her, and who made her learn by heart the psalms which are chanted in church. After a year or two the worthy old lady had reached the end of her tether, and was conscientious enough to come and tell my mother so. She said, “I have nothing more to teach her; she knows all that I know better than I do myself.” The Catholic faith revived in these remote districts, with all its respectable gravity and, fortunately for it, disencumbered of the worldly and temporal bonds which the ancient _regime_ had forged for it.
This complexity of origin is, I believe, to a great extent the cause of my seeming inconsistency. I am double, as it were, and one half of me laughs while the other weeps. This is the explanation of my cheerfulness. As I am two spirits in one body, one of them has always cause to be content. While upon the one hand I was only anxious to be a village priest or tutor in a seminary. I was all the time dreaming the strangest dreams. During divine service I used to fall into long reveries; my eyes wandered to the ceiling of the chapel, upon which I read all sorts of strange things. My thoughts wandered to the great men whom we read of in history. I was playing one day, when six years old, with one of my cousins and other friends, and we amused ourselves by selecting our future professions. “And what will you be?” my cousin asked me. “I shall make books.” “You mean that you will be a bookseller.” “Oh, no,” I replied, “I mean to make books–to compose them.” These dawning dispositions needed time and favourable circumstances to be developed, and what was so completely lacking in all my surroundings was ability. My worthy tutors were not endowed with any seductive qualities. With their unswerving moral solidity, they were the very contrary of the southerners–of the Neapolitan, for instance, who is all glitter and clatter. Ideas did not ring within their minds with the sonorous clash of crossing swords. Their head was like what a Chinese cap without bells would be; you might shake it, but it would not jingle. That which constitutes the essence of talent, the desire to show off one’s thoughts to the best advantage, would have seemed to them sheer frivolity, like women’s love of dress, which they denounced as a positive sin. This excessive abnegation of self, this too ready disposition to repulse what the world at large likes by an _Abrenuntio tibi, Satana_, is fatal to literature. It will be said, perhaps, that literature necessarily implies more or less of sin. If the Gascon tendency to elude many difficulties with a joke, which I derived from my mother, had always been dormant in me, my spiritual welfare would perhaps have been assured. In any event, if I had remained in Brittany I should never have known anything of the vanity which the public has liked and encouraged–that of attaining a certain amount of art in the arrangement of words and ideas. Had I lived in Brittany I should have written like Rollin. When I came to Paris I had no sooner given people a taste of what few qualities I possessed than they took a liking for them, and so–to my disadvantage it may be–I was tempted to go on.
I will at some future time describe how it came to pass that special circumstances brought about this change, which I underwent without being at heart in the least inconsistent with my past. I had formed such a serious idea of religious belief and duty that it was impossible for me, when once my faith faded, to wear the mask which sits so lightly upon many others. But the impress remained, and though I was not a priest by profession I was so in disposition. All my failings sprung from that. My first masters taught me to despise laymen, and inculcated the idea that the man who has not a mission in life is the scum of the earth. Thus it is that I have had a strong and unfair bias against the commercial classes. Upon the other hand, I am very fond of the people, and especially of the poor. I am the only man of my time who has understood the characters of Jesus and of Francis of Assisi. There was a danger of my thus becoming a democrat like Lamennais. But Lamennais merely exchanged one creed for another, and it was not until the close of his life that he acquired the cool temper necessary to the critic, whereas the same process which weaned me from Christianity made me impervious to any other practical enthusiasm. It was the very philosophy of knowledge which, in my revolt against scholasticism, underwent such a profound modification.
A more serious drawback is that, having never indulged in gaiety while young, and yet having a good deal of irony and cheerfulness in my temperament, I have been compelled, at an age when we see how vain and empty it all is, to be very lenient as regards foibles which I had never indulged in myself, so much so that many persons who have not perhaps been as steady as I was have been shocked at my easy-going indifference. This holds especially true of politics. This is a matter upon which I feel easier in my mind than upon any other, and yet a great many people look upon me as being very lax. I cannot get out of my head the idea that perhaps the libertine is right after all and practises the true philosophy of life. This has led me to express too much admiration for such men as Sainte-Beuve and Theophile Gautier. Their affectation of immorality prevented me from seeing how incoherent their philosophy was. The fear of appearing pharisaical, the idea, evangelical in itself, that he who is immaculate has the right to be indulgent, and the dread of misleading, if by chance all the doctrines emitted by the professors of philosophy were wrong, made my system of morality appear rather shaky. It is, in reality, as solid as the rock. These little liberties which I allow myself are by way of a recompense for my strict adherence to the general code. So in politics I indulge in reactionary remarks so that I may not have the appearance of a Liberal understrapper. I don’t want people to take me for being more of a dupe than I am in reality; I would not upon any account trade upon my opinions, and what I especially dread is to appear in my own eyes to be passing bad money. Jesus has influenced me more in this respect than people may think, for He loved to show up and deride hypocrisy, and in His parable of the Prodigal Son He places morality upon its true footing–kindness of heart–while seeming to upset it altogether.
To the same cause may be attributed another of my defects, a tendency to waver which has almost neutralized my power of giving verbal expression to my thoughts in many matters. The priest carries his sacred character into every relation of life, and there is a good deal of what is conventional about what he says. In this respect, I have remained a priest, and this is all the more absurd because I do not derive any benefit either for myself or for my opinions. In my writings, I have been outspoken to a degree. Not only have I never said anything which I do not think, but, what is much less frequent and far more difficult, I have said all I think. But in talking and in letter-writing, I am at times singularly weak. I do not attach any importance to this, and, with the exception of the select few between whom and myself there is a bond of intellectual brotherhood, I say to people just what I think is likely to please them. In the society of fashionable people I am utterly lost. I get into a muddle and flounder about, losing the thread of my ideas in some tissue of absurdity. With an inveterate habit of being over polite, as priests generally are, I am too anxious to detect what the person I am talking with would like said to him. My attention, when I am conversing with any one, is engrossed in trying to guess at his ideas, and, from excess of deference, to anticipate him in the expression of them. This is based upon the supposition that very few men are so far unconcerned as to their own ideas as not to be annoyed when one differs from them. I only express myself freely with people whose opinions I know to sit lightly upon them, and who look down upon everything with good-natured contempt. My correspondence will be a disgrace to me if it should be published after my death. It is a perfect torture for me to write a letter. I can understand a person airing his talents before ten as before ten thousand persons, but before one! Before beginning to write, I hesitate and reflect, and make out a rough copy of what I shall say; very often I go to sleep over it. A person need only look at these letters with their heavy wording and abrupt sentences to see that they were composed in a state of torpor which borders on sleep. Reading over what I have written, I see that it is poor stuff, and that I have said many things which I cannot vouch for. In despair, I fasten down the envelope, with the feeling that I have posted a letter which is beneath criticism.
In short, all my defects are those of the young ecclesiastical student of Treguier. I was born to be a priest, as others are born to be soldiers and lawyers. The very fact of my being successful in my studies was a proof of it. What was the good of learning Latin so thoroughly if it was not for the Church? A peasant, noticing all my dictionaries upon one occasion, observed: “These, I suppose, are the books which people study when they are preparing for the priesthood.” As a matter of fact, all those who studied at school at all were in training for the ecclesiastical profession. The priestly order stood on a par with the nobility: “When you meet a noble,” I have heard it observed, “you salute him, because he represents the king; when you meet a priest, you salute him because he represents God.” To make a priest was regarded as the greatest of good works; and the elderly spinsters who had a little money thought that they could not find a better use for it than in paying the college fees of a poor but hard-working young peasant. When he came to be a priest, he became their own child, their glory, and their honour. They followed him in his career, and watched over his conduct with jealous care. As a natural consequence of my assiduity in study I was destined for the priesthood. Moreover, I was of sedentary habits and too weak of muscle to distinguish myself in athletic sports. I had an uncle of a Voltairian turn of mind, who did not at all approve of this. He was a watchmaker, and had reckoned upon me to take on his business. My successes were as gall and wormwood to him, for he quite saw that all this store of Latin was dead against him, and that it would convert me into a pillar of the Church which he disliked. He never lost an opportunity of airing before me his favourite phrase, “a donkey loaded with Latin.” Afterwards, when my writings were published, he had his triumph. I sometimes reproach myself for having contributed to the triumph of M. Homais over his priest. But it cannot be helped, for M. Homais is right. But for M. Homais we should all be burnt at the stake. But as I have said, when one has been at great pains to learn the truth, it is irritating to have to allow that the frivolous, who could never be induced to read a line of St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, are the true sages. It is hard to think that Gavroche and M. Homais attain without an effort the alpine heights of philosophy.
My young compatriot and friend, M. Quellien, a Breton poet full of raciness and originality, the only man of the present day whom I have known to possess the faculty of creating myths, has described this phase of my destiny in a very ingenious style. He says that my soul will dwell, in the shape of a white sea-bird, around the ruined church of St. Michel, an old building struck by lightning which stands above Treguier. The bird will fly all night with plaintive cries around the barricaded door and windows, seeking to enter the sanctuary, but not knowing that there is a secret door. And so through all eternity my unhappy spirit will moan, ceaselessly upon this hill. “It is the spirit of a priest who wants to say mass,” one peasant will observe.–“He will never find a boy to serve it for him,” will rejoin another. And that is what I really am–an incomplete priest. Quellien has very clearly discerned what will always be lacking in my church–the chorister boy. My life is like a mass which has some fatality hanging over it, a never-ending _Introibo ad altare Dei_ with no one to respond: _Ad Deum qui loetificat juventutem meam_. There is no one to serve my mass for me. In default of any one else I respond for myself, but it is not the same thing.
Thus everything seemed to make for my having a modest ecclesiastical career in Brittany. I should have made a very good priest, indulgent, fatherly, charitable, and of blameless morals. I should have been as a priest what I am as a father, very much loved by my flock, and as easy-going as possible in the exercise of my authority. What are now defects would have been good qualities. Some of the errors which I profess would have been just the thing for a man who identifies himself with the spirit of his calling. I should have got rid of some excrescences which, being only a layman, I have not taken the trouble to remove, easy as it would have been for me to do so. My career would have been as follows: at two-and-twenty professor at the College of Treguier, and at about fifty canon, or perhaps grand vicar at St. Brieuc, very conscientious, very generally respected, a kind-hearted and gentle confessor. Little inclined to new dogmas, I should have been bold enough to say with many good ecclesiastics after the Vatican Council: _Posui custodiam ori meo._ My antipathy for the Jesuits would have shown itself by never alluding to them, and a fund of mild Gallicanism would have been veiled beneath the semblance of a profound knowledge of canon law.
An extraneous incident altered the whole current of my life. From the most obscure of little towns in the most remote of provinces I was thrust without preparation into the vortex of all that is most sprightly and alert in Parisian society. The world stood revealed to me, and my self became a double one. The Gascon got the better of the Breton; there was no more _custodia oris mei_, and I put aside the padlock which I should otherwise have set upon my mouth. In so far as regards my inner self I remained the same. But what a change in the outward show! Hitherto I had lived in a hypogeum, lighted by smoky lamps; now I was going to see the sun and the light of day.
THE PETTY SEMINARY OF SAINT NICHOLAS DU CHARDONNET.
PART II.
About the month of April, 1838, M. de Talleyrand, feeling his end draw near, thought it necessary to act a last lie in accordance with human prejudices, and he resolved to be reconciled, in appearance, to a Church whose truth, once acknowledged by him, convicted him of sacrilege and of dishonour. This ticklish job could best be performed, not by a staid priest of the old Gallican school, who might have insisted upon a categorical retractation of errors, upon his making amends and upon his doing penance; not by a young Ultramontane of the new school, against whom M. de Talleyrand would at once have been very prejudiced, but by a priest who was a man of the world, well-read, very little of a philosopher, and nothing of a theologian, and upon those terms with the ancient classes which alone give the Gospel occasional access to circles for which it is not suited. Abbe Dupanloup, already well known for his success at the Catechism of the Assumption among a public which set more store by elegant phrases than doctrine, was just the man to play an innocent part in the comedy which simple souls would regard as an edifying act of grace. His intimacy with the Duchesse de Dino, and especially with her daughter, whose religious education he had conducted, the favour in which he was held by M. de Quelen (Archbishop of Paris), and the patronage which from the outset of his career had been accorded him by the Faubourg St. Germain, all concurred to fit him for a work which required more worldly tact than theology, and in which both earth and heaven were to be fooled.
It is said that M. de Talleyrand, remarking a certain hesitation on the part of the priest who was about to convert him, ejaculated: “This young man does not know his business.” If he really did make this remark, he was very much mistaken. Never was a priest better up in his calling than this young man. The aged statesman, resolved not to erase his past until the very last hour, met all the entreaties made to him with a sullen “not yet.” The _Sto ad ostium etpulso_ had to be brought into play with great tact. A fainting-fit, or a sudden acceleration in the progress of the death-agony would be fatal, and too much importunity might bring out a “No” which would upset the plans so skilfully laid. Upon the morning of May 17th, which was the day of his death, nothing was yet signed. Catholics, as is well known, attach very great importance to the moment of death. If future rewards and punishments have any real existence, it is evident that they must be proportioned to a whole life of virtue or of vice. But the Catholic does not look at it in this light, and an edifying death-bed makes up for all other things. Salvation is left to the chances of the eleventh hour. Time pressed, and it was resolved to play a bold game. M. Dupanloup was waiting in the next room, and he sent the winsome daughter of the Duchesse de Dino, of whom Talleyrand was always so fond, to ask if he might come in. The answer, for a wonder, was in the affirmative, and the priest spent several minutes with him, bringing out from the sick-room a paper signed “Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, Prince de Benevent.”
There was joy–if not in heaven, at all events in the Catholic world of the Faubourgs St. Germain and St. Honore. The credit of this victory was ascribed, in the main, to the female grace which had succeeded in getting round the aged prince, and inducing him to retract the whole of his revolutionary past, but some of it went to the youthful ecclesiastic who had displayed so much tact in bringing to a satisfactory conclusion a project in which it was so easy to fail. M. Dupanloup was from that day one of the first of French priests. Position, honours, and money were pressed upon him by the wealthy and influential classes in Paris. The money he accepted, but do not for a moment suppose that it was for himself, as there never was any one so unselfish as M. Dupanloup. The quotation from the Bible which was oftenest upon his lips, and which was doubly a favourite one with him because it was truly Scriptural and happened to terminate like a Latin verse was: _Da mihi animas; cetera tolle tibi_. He had at that time in his mind the general outlines of a grand propaganda by means of classical and religious education, and he threw himself into it with all the passionate ardour which he displayed in the undertakings upon which he embarked.
The seminary Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet, situated by the side of the church of that name, between the Rue Saint Victor and the Rue de Pontoise, had since the Revolution been the petty seminary for the diocese of Paris. This was not its primitive destination. In the great movement of religious reform which occurred during the first half of the seventeenth century, and to which the names of Vincent de Paul, Olier, Berulle, and Father Eudes are attached, the church of Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet filled, though in a humbler measure, the same part as Saint Sulpice. The parish of Saint Nicholas, which derived its name from a field of thistles well known to students at the University of Paris in the middle ages, was then the centre of a very wealthy neighbourhood, the principal residents belonging to the magistracy. As Olier founded the St. Sulpice Seminary, so Adrien de Bourdoise, founded the company of Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet, and made this establishment a nursery for young priests which lasted until the Revolution. It had not, however, like the Saint Sulpice establishment, a number of branch houses in other parts of France. Moreover, the association was not revived after the Revolution like that of Saint Sulpice, and their building in the Rue Saint Victor was untenanted. At the time of the Concordat it was given to the diocese of Paris, to be used as a petty seminary. Up to 1837, this establishment did not make any sort of a name for itself. The brilliant Renaissance of learned and worldly clericalism dates from the decade of 1830-40. During the first third of the century, Saint Nicholas was an obscure religious establishment, the number of students being below the requirements of the diocese, and the level of study a very low one. Abbe Frere, the head of the seminary, though a profound theologian and well versed in the mysticism of the Christian faith, was not in the least suited to rouse and stimulate lads who were engaged in literary study. Saint Nicholas, under his headship, was a thoroughly ecclesiastical establishment, its comparatively few students having a clerical career in view, and the secular side of education was passed over entirely.
M. de Quelen was very well inspired when he entrusted the management of this college to M. Dupanloup. The archbishop was not the man to approve of the strict clericalism of Abbe Frere. He liked _piety_, but worldly and well-bred piety, without any scholastic barbarisms or mystic jargon, piety as a complement of the well-bred ideal which, to tell the truth, was his main faith. If Hugues or Richard de Saint Victor had risen up before him in the shape of pedants or boors he would have set little store by them. He was very much attached to M. Dupanloup, who was at that time Legitimist and Ultramontane. It was only the exaggerations of a later day which so changed the parts that he came to be looked upon as a Gallican and an Orleanist. M. de Quelen treated him as a spiritual son, sharing his dislikes and his prejudices. He doubtless knew the secret of his birth. The families which had looked after the young priest, had made him a man of breeding, and admitted him into their exclusive coterie, were those with which the archbishop was intimate, and which formed in his eyes the limits of the universe. I remember seeing M. de Quelen, and he was quite the type of the ideal bishop under the old _regime_. I remember his feminine beauty, his perfect figure, and the easy grace of all his movements. His mind had received no other cultivation than that of a well-educated man of the world. Religion in his eyes was inseparable from good breeding and the modicum of common sense which a classical education is apt to give.
This was about the level of M. Dupanloup’s intellect. He had neither the brilliant imagination which will give a lasting value to certain of Lacordaire’s and Montalembert’s works, nor the profound passion of Lamennais. In the case of the archbishop and M. Dupanloup, good breeding and polish were the main thing, and the approval of those who stood high in the world was the touchstone of merit. They knew nothing of theology, which they had studied but little, and for which they thought it enough to express platonic reverence. Their faith was very keen and sincere, but it was a faith which took everything for granted, and which did not busy itself with the dogmas which must be accepted. They knew that scholasticism would not go down with the only public for which they cared–the worldly and somewhat frivolous congregations which sit beneath the preachers at St. Roch or St. Thomas Aquinas.
Such were the views entertained by M. de Quelen when he made over to M. Dupanloup the austere and little known establishment of Abbe Frere and Adrien de Bourdoise. The petty seminary of Paris had hitherto, by virtue of the Concordat, been merely a training school for the clergy of Paris, quite sufficient for its purpose, but strictly confined to the object prescribed by the law. The new superior chosen by the archbishop had far higher aims. He set to work to re-construct the whole fabric, from the buildings themselves, of which only the old walls were left standing, to the course of teaching, which he re-cast entirely. There were two essential points which he kept before him. In the first place he saw that a petty seminary which was altogether ecclesiastical could not answer in Paris, and would never suffice to recruit a sufficient number of priests for the diocese. He accordingly utilised the information which reached him, especially from the west of France and from his native Savoy, to bring to the college any youths of promise whom he might hear of. Secondly, he determined that the college should become a model place of education instead of being a strict seminary with all the asceticism of a place in which the clerical element was unalloyed. He hoped to let the same course of education serve for the young men studying for the priesthood, and for the sons of the highest families in France. His success in the Rue Saint Florentin (this was where Talleyrand died) had made him a favourite with the Legitimists, and he had several useful friends among the Orleanists. Well posted in all the fashionable changes, and neglecting no opportunity for pushing himself, he was always quick to adapt himself to the spirit of the time. His theory of what the world should be was a very aristocratic one, but he maintained that there were three orders of aristocracy: the nobility, the clergy, and literature. What he wished to insure was a liberal education, which would be equally suitable for the clergy and for the youths of the Faubourg Saint Germain, based upon Christian piety and classical literature. The study of science was almost entirely excluded, and he himself had not even a smattering of it.
Thus the old house in the Rue Saint Victor was for many years the rendezvous of youths bearing the most famous of French names, and it was considered a very great favour for a young man to obtain admission. The large sums which many rich people paid to secure admission for their sons served to provide a free education for young men without fortune who had shown signs of talent. This testified to the unbounded faith of M. Dupanloup in classical learning. He looked upon these classical studies as part and parcel of religion. He held that youths destined for holy orders and those who were in afterlife to occupy the highest social positions should both receive the same education. Virgil, he thought should be as much a part of a priest’s intellectual training as the Bible. He hoped that the _elite_ of his theological students would, by their association upon equal terms with young men of good family, acquire more polish and a higher social tone than can be obtained in seminaries peopled by peasants’ sons. He was wonderfully successful in this respect. The college, though consisting of two elements, apparently incongruous, was remarkable for its unity. The knowledge that talent overrode all other considerations prevented anything like jealousy, and by the end of a week the poorest youth from the provinces, awkward and simple as he might be, was envied by the young millionaire–who, little as he might know it, was paying for his schooling–if he had turned out some good Latin verses, or written a clever exercise.
In the year 1838, I was fortunate enough to win all the prizes in my class at the Treguier College. The _palmares_ happened to be seen by one of the enlightened men whom M. Dupanloup employed to recruit his youthful army. My fate was settled in a twinkling, and “Have him sent for” was the order of the impulsive Superior. I was fifteen and a half years old, and we had no time to reflect. I was spending the holidays with a friend in a village near Treguier, and in the afternoon of the 4th of September I was sent for in haste. I remember my returning home as well as if it was only yesterday. We had a league to travel through the country. The vesper bell with its soft cadence echoing from steeple to steeple awoke a sensation of gentle melancholy, the image of the life which I was about to abandon for ever. The next day I started for Paris; upon the 7th I beheld sights which were as novel for me as if I had been suddenly landed in France from Tahiti or Timbuctoo.
THE PETTY SEMINARY OF SAINT NICHOLAS DU CHARDONNET.
PART III.
No Buddhist Lama or Mussulman Fakir, suddenly translated from Asia to the Boulevards of Paris, could have been more taken aback than I was upon being suddenly landed in a place so different from that in which moved my old Breton priests, who, with their venerable heads all wood or granite, remind one of the Osirian colossi which in after life so struck my fancy when I saw them in Egypt, grandiose in their long lines of immemorial calm. My coming to Paris marked the passage from one religion to another. There was as much difference between Christianity as I left it in Brittany and that which I found current in Paris, as there is between a piece of old cloth, as stiff as a board, and a bit of fine cambric. It was not the same religion. My old priests, with their heavy old-fashioned copes, had always seemed to me like the magi, from whose lips came the eternal truths, whereas the new religion to which I was introduced was all print and calico, a piety decked out with ribbons and scented with musk, a devotion which found expression in tapers and small flower-pots, a young lady’s theology without stay or style, as composite as the polychrome frontispiece of one of Lebel’s prayer-books.
This was the gravest crisis in my life. The young Breton does not bear transplanting. The keen moral repulsion which I felt, superadded to a complete change in my habits and mode of life, brought on a very severe attack of home-sickness. The confinement to the college was intolerable. The remembrance of the free and happy life which I had hitherto led with my mother went to my very heart. I was not the only sufferer. M. Dupanloup had not calculated all the consequences of his policy. Imperious as a military commander, he did not take into account the deaths and casualties which occurred among his young recruits. We confided our sorrows to one another. My most intimate friend, a young man from Coutances, if I remember right, who had been, transported like myself from a happy home, brooded in solitary grief over the change and died. The natives of Savoy were even less easily acclimatised. One of them, who was rather my senior, confessed to me that every evening he calculated the distance from his dormitory on the third floor to the pavement in the street below. I fell ill, and to all appearances was not likely to recover. The melancholy to which Bretons are so subject took hold of me. The memories of the last notes of the vesper bell which I had heard pealing over our dear hills, and of the last sunset upon our peaceful plains, pricked me like pointed darts.
According to every rule of medicine I ought to have died; and it is perhaps a pity that I did not. Two friends whom I brought with me from Brittany, in the following year gave this clear proof of fidelity. They could not accustom themselves to this new world, and they left it. I sometimes think that the Breton part of me did die; the Gascon, unfortunately, found sufficient reason for living! The latter discovered, too, that this new world was a very curious one, and was well worth clinging to. It was to him who had put me to this severe test that I owed my escape from death. I am indebted to M. Dupanloup for two things: for having brought me to Paris, and for having saved me from dying when I got there. He naturally did not concern himself much about me at first. The most eagerly sought after priest in Paris, with an establishment of two hundred students to superintend or rather to found, could not be expected to take any deep personal interest in an obscure youth. A peculiar incident formed a bond between us. The real cause of my suffering was the ever-present souvenir of my mother. Having always lived alone with her, I could not tear myself away from the recollection of the peaceful, happy life which I had led year after year. I had been happy, and I had been poor with her. A thousand details of this very poverty, which absence made all the more touching, searched out my very heart. At night I was always thinking of her, and I could get no sleep. My only consolation was to write her letters full of tender feeling and moist with tears. Our letters, as is the usage in religious establishments, were read by one of the masters. He was so struck by the tone of deep affection which pervaded my boyish utterances that he showed one of them to M. Dupanloup, who was very much surprised when he read it.
The noblest trait in M. Dupanloup’s character was his affection for his mother. Though his birth was, in one way, the greatest trouble of his life, he worshipped his mother. She lived with him, and though we never saw her, we knew that he always spent so much time with her every day. He often said that a man’s worth is to be measured by the respect he pays to his mother. He gave us excellent advice upon this head which I never failed to follow, as, for instance, never to address her in the second person singular, or to end a letter without using the word _respect_. This created a connecting link between us. My letter was shown to him on a Friday, upon which evening the reports for the week were always read out before him. I had not, upon that occasion, done very well with my composition, being only fifth or sixth. “Ah!” he said, “if the subject had been that of a letter which I read this morning, Ernest Renan would have been first.” From that time forth he noticed me. He recognised the fact of my existence, and I regarded him, as we all did, as a principle of life, a sort of god. One worship took the place of another, and the sentiment inspired by my early teachers gradually died out.
Only those who knew Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet during the brilliant period from 1838 to 1844 can form an adequate idea of the intense life which prevailed there.[1] And this life had only one source, one principle: M. Dupanloup himself. The whole work fell on his shoulders. Regulations, usage administration, the spiritual and temporal government of the college, were all centred in him. The college was full of defects, but he made up for them all. As a writer and an orator he was only second-rate, but as an educator of youth he had no equal. The old rules of Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet provided, as in all other seminaries, that half an hour should be devoted every evening to what was known as spiritual reading. Before M. Dupanloup’s time, the readings were from some ascetic book such as the _Lives of the Fathers in the Desert_, but he took this half hour for himself, and every evening he put himself into direct communication with all his pupils by the medium of a familiar conversation, which was so natural and unrestrained that it might often have borne comparison with the homilies of John Chrysostom in the Palaea of Antioch. Any incident in the inner life of the college, any occurrence directly concerning himself or one of the pupils furnished the theme for a brief and lively soliloquy. The reading of the reports on Friday was still more dramatic and personal, and we all anticipated that day with a mixture of hope and apprehension. The observations with which he interlarded the reading of the notes were charged with life and death. There was no mode of punishment in force; the reading of the notes and the reflections which he made upon them being the sole means which he employed to keep us all on the _qui vive_. This system, doubtless, had its drawbacks. Worshipped by his pupils, M. Dupanloup was not always liked by his fellow-workers. I have been told that it was the same in his diocese, and that he was always a greater favourite with his laymen than with his priests. There can be no doubt that he put every one about him into the background. But his very violence made us like him, for we felt that all his thoughts were concentrated on us. He was without an equal in the art of rousing his pupils to exertion, and of getting the maximum amount of work out of each. Each pupil had a distinct existence in his mind, and for each one of them he was an ever-present stimulus to work. He set great store by talent, and treated it as the groundwork of faith. He often said that a man’s worth must be measured by his faculty for admiration. His own admiration was not always very enlightened or scientific, but it was prompted by a generous spirit, and a heart really glowing with the love of the beautiful. He was the Villemain of the Catholic school, and M. Villemain was the friend whom he loved and appreciated the most among laymen. Every time he had seen him, he related the conversation which they had together in terms of the warmest sympathy.
The defects of his own mind were reflected in the education which he imparted. He was not sufficiently rational or scientific. It might have been thought that his two hundred pupils were all destined to be poets, writers, and orators. He set little value on learning without talent. This was made very clear at the entrance of the Nicolaites to St. Sulpice, where talent was held of no account, and where scholasticism and erudition alone were prized. When it came to a question of doing an exercise of logic or philosophy in barbarous Latin, the students of St. Nicholas, who had been fed upon more delicate literature, could not stomach such coarse food. They were not, therefore, much liked at St. Sulpice, to which M. Dupanloup, was never appointed, as he was considered to be too little of a theologian. When an ex-student of St. Nicholas ventured to speak of his former school, the old tutors would remark: “Oh, yes! in the time of M. Bourdoise,” as much as to say that the seventeenth century was the period during which this establishment achieved its celebrity.
Whatever its shortcomings in some respects, the education given at St. Nicholas was of a very high literary standard. Clerical education has this superiority over a university education, that it is absolutely independent in everything which does not relate to religion. Literature is discussed under all its aspects, and the yoke of classical dogma sits much more lightly. This is how it was that Lamartine, whose education and training were altogether clerical, was far more intelligent than any university man; and when this is followed by philosophical emancipation, the result is a very frank and unbiased mind. I completed my classical education without having read Voltaire, but I knew the _Soirees de St. Petersbourg_ by heart, and its style, the defects of which I did not discover until much later, had a very stimulating effect upon me.
The discussions on romanticism, then so fierce in the world outside, found their way into the college and all our talk was of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. The superior joined in with them, and for nearly a year they were the sole topic of our spiritual readings. M. Dupanloup did not go all the way with the champions of romanticism, but he was much more with them than against them. Thus it was that I came to know of the struggles of the day. Later still, the _solvuntur objecta_ of the theologians enabled me to attain liberty of thought. The thorough good faith of the ancient ecclesiastical teaching consisted in not dissimulating the force of any objection, and as the answers were generally very weak, a clever person could work out the truth for himself.
I learnt much, too, from the course of lectures on history. Abbe Richard[2] gave these lectures in the spirit of the modern school and with marked ability. For some reason or other his lectures were interrupted, and his place was taken by a tutor, who with many other engagements on hand, merely read to us some old notes, interspersed with extracts from modern books. Among these modern volumes, which often formed a striking contrast with the jog-trot old notes, there was one which produced a very singular effect upon me. Whenever he began to read from it I was incapable of taking a single note, my whole being seeming to thrill with intoxicating harmony. The book was Michelet’s _Histoire de France_, the passages which so affected me being in the fifth and sixth volumes. Thus the modern age penetrated into me as through all the fissures of a cracked cement. I had come to Paris with a complete moral training, but ignorant to the last degree. I had everything to learn. It was a great surprise for me when I found that there was such a person as a serious and learned layman. I discovered that antiquity and the Church are not everything in this world, and especially that contemporary literature was well worthy of attention. I ceased to look upon the death of Louis XIV. as marking the end of the world. I became imbued with ideas and sentiments which had no expression in antiquity or in the seventeenth century.
So the germ which was in me began to sprout. Distasteful as it was in many respects to my nature, this education had the effect of a chemical reagent, and stirred all the life and activity that was in me. For the essential thing in education is not the doctrine taught, but the arousing of the faculties. In proportion as the foundations of my religious faith had been shaken by finding the same names applied to things so different, so did my mind greedily swallow the new beverage prepared for it. The world broke in upon me. Despite its claim to be a refuge to which the stir of the outside world never penetrated, St. Nicholas was at this period the most brilliant and worldly house in Paris. The atmosphere of Paris–minus, let me add, its corruptions–penetrated by door and window; Paris with its pettiness and its grandeur, its revolutionary force and its lapses into flabby indifference. My old Brittany priests knew much more Latin and mathematics than my new masters; but they lived in the catacombs, bereft of light and air. Here, the atmosphere of the age had free course. In our walks to Gentilly of an evening we engaged in endless discussions. I could never sleep of a night after that; my head was full of Hugo and Lamartine. I understood what glory was after having vaguely expected to find it in the roof of the chapel at Treguier. In the course of a short time a very great revelation was borne in upon me. The words talent, brilliancy, and reputation, conveyed a meaning to me. The modest, ideal which my earliest teachers had inculcated faded away; I had embarked upon a sea agitated by all the storms and currents of the age. These currents and gales were bound to drive my vessel towards a coast whither my former friends would tremble to see me land.
My performances in class were very irregular. Upon one occasion I wrote an _Alexander_, which must be in the prize exercise book, and which I would reprint if I had it by me. But purely rhetorical compositions were very distasteful to me; I could never make a decent speech. Upon one prize-day we got up a representation of the Council of Clermont, and the various speeches suitable to the occasion were allotted by competition. I was a miserable failure as Peter the Hermit and Urban II.; my Godefroy de Bouillon was pronounced to be utterly devoid of military ardour. A warlike song in Sapphic and Adonic stanzas created a more favourable impression. My refrain _Sternite Turcas_, a short and sharp solution of the Eastern Question, was selected for recital in public. I was too staid for these childish proceedings. We were often set to write a Middle Age tale, terminating with some striking miracle, and I was far too fond of selecting the cure of lepers. I often thought of my early studies in mathematics, in which I was pretty well advanced, and I spoke of it to my fellow students, who were much amused at the idea, for mathematics stood very low in their estimation, compared to the literary studies which they looked upon as the highest expression of human intelligence. My reasoning powers only revealed themselves later, while studying philosophy at Issy. The first time that my fellow pupils heard me argue in Latin they were surprised. They saw at once that I was of a different race from themselves, and that I should still be marching forward when they had reached the bounds set for them. But in rhetoric I did not stand so well. I looked upon it as a pure waste of time and ingenuity to write when one has no thoughts of one’s own to express.
The groundwork of ideas upon which education at St. Nicholas was based was shallow, but it was brilliant upon the surface, and the elevation of feeling which pervaded the whole system was another notable feature. I have said that no kind of punishment was administered; or, to speak more accurately, there was only one, expulsion. Except in cases where some grave offence had been committed, there was nothing degrading in being dismissed. No particular reason was alleged, the superior saying to the student who was sent away: “You are a very worthy young man, but your intelligence is not of the turn we require. Let us part friends. Is there any service I can do you?” The favour of being allowed to share in an education considered to be so exceptionally good was thought so much of that we dreaded an announcement of this kind like a sentence of death. This is one of the secrets of the superiority of ecclesiastical over state colleges; their _regime_ is much more liberal, for none of the students are there by right, and coercion must inevitably lead to separation. There is something cold and hard about the schools and colleges of the state, while the fact of a student having secured by a competitive examination an inalienable right to his place in them, is an infallible source of weakness. For my own part I have never been able to understand how the master of a normal school, for instance, manages, inasmuch as he is unable to say, without further explanation, to the pupils who are unsuited for their vocation: “You have not the bent of intelligence for our calling, but I have no doubt that you are a very good lad, and that you will get on better elsewhere. Good-bye.” Even the most trifling punishment implies a servile principle of obedience from fear. So far as I am myself concerned, I do not think that at any period of my life I have been obedient. I have, I know, been docile and submissive, but it has been to a spiritual principle, not to a material force wielding the dread of punishment. My mother never ordered me to do a thing. The relations between my ecclesiastical teachers and myself were entirely free and spontaneous. Whoever has had experience of this _rationabile obsequium_ cannot put up with any other. An order is a humiliation whosoever has to obey is a _capitis minor_ sullied on the very threshold of the higher life. Ecclesiastical obedience has nothing lowering about it; for it is voluntary, and those who do not get on together can separate. In one of my Utopian dreams of an aristocratic society, I have provided that there should only be one penalty, death; or rather, that all serious offences should be visited by a reprimand from the recognised authorities which no man of honour would survive. I should never have done to be a soldier, for I should either have deserted or committed suicide. I am afraid that the new military institutions which do not leave a place for any exceptions or equivalents will have a very lowering moral effect. To compel every one to obey is fatal to genius and talent. The man who has passed years in the carriage of arms after the German fashion is dead to all delicate work whether of the hand or brain. Thus it is that Germany would be devoid of all talent since she has been engrossed in military pursuits, but for the Jews, to whom she is so ungrateful.
The generation which was from fifteen to twenty years of age, at the brilliant but fleeting epoch of which I am speaking, is now between fifty-five and sixty. It will be asked whether this generation has realised the unbounded hopes which the ardent spirit of our great preceptor had conceived. The answer must unquestionably be in the negative, for if these hopes had been fulfilled the face of the world would have been completely changed. M. Dupanloup was too little in love with his age, and too uncompromising to its spirit, to mould men in accordance with the temper of the time. When I recall one of these spiritual readings during which the master poured out the treasures of his intelligence, the class-room with its serried benches upon which clustered two hundred lads hushed in attentive respect, and when I set myself to inquire whither have fled the two hundred souls, so closely bound together by the ascendency of one man, I count more than one case of waste and eccentricity; as might be expected, I can count archbishops, bishops, and other dignitaries of the Church, all to a certain extent enlightened and moderate in their views. I come upon diplomatists, councillors of state, and others, whose honourable careers would in some instances have been more brilliant if Marshal MacMahon’s dismissal of his ministry on the 16th of May, 1877, had been a success. But, strange to say, I see among those who sat beside a future prelate a young man destined to sharpen his knife so well that he will drive it home to his archbishop’s heart…. I think I can remember Verger, and I may say of him as Sachetti said of the beatified Florentine: _Fu mia vicina, andava come le altre._ The education given us had its dangers; it had a tendency to produce over excitement, and to turn the balance of the mind, as it did in Verger’s case.
A still more striking instance of the saying that “the spirit bloweth where it listeth,” was that of H. de —-. When I first entered at Saint-Nicholas he was the object of my special admiration. He was a youth of exceptional talent, and he was a long way ahead of all his comrades in rhetoric. His staid and elevated piety sprung from a nature endowed with the loftiest aspirations. He quite came up to our idea of perfection, and according to the custom of ecclesiastical colleges, in which the senior pupils share the duties of the masters, the most important of these functions were confided to him. His piety was equally great for several years at the seminary of St. Sulpice. He would remain for hours in the chapel, especially on holy days, bathed in tears. I well remember one summer evening at Gentilly–which was the country-house of the Petty Seminary of Saint-Nicholas–how we clustered round some of the senior students and one of the masters noted for his Christian piety, listening intently to what they told us. The conversation had taken a very serious turn, the question under discussion being the ever-enduring problem upon which all Christianity rests–the question of divine election–the doubt in which each individual soul must stand until the last hour, whether he will be saved. The good priest dwelt specially upon this, telling us that no one can be sure, however great may be the favours which Heaven has showered upon him, that he will not fall away at the last. “I think,” he said, “that I have known one case of predestination.” There was a hush, and after a pause he added, “I mean H. de —-; if any one is sure of being saved it is he. And yet who can tell that H. de —- is not a reprobate?” I saw H. de —- again many years afterwards. He had in the interval studied the Bible very deeply. I could not tell whether he was entirely estranged from Christianity, but he no longer wore the priestly garb, and was very bitter against clericalism. When I met him later still I found that he had become a convert to extreme democratic ideas, and with the passionate exaltation which was the principal trait in his character, he was bent upon inaugurating the reign of justice. His head was full of America, and I think that he must be there now. A few years ago one of our old comrades told me that he had read a name not unlike his among the list of men shot for participation in the Communist insurrection of 1871. I think that he was mistaken, but there can be no doubt that the career of poor H. de —- was shipwrecked by some great storm. His many high qualities were neutralised by his passionate temper. He was by far the most gifted of my fellow pupils at Saint-Nicholas. But he had not the good sense to keep cool in politics. A man who behaved as he did might get shot twenty times. Idealists like us must be very careful how we play with those tools. We are very likely to leave our heads or our wing-feathers behind us. The temptation for a priest who has thrown up the Church to become a democrat is very strong, beyond doubt, for by so doing he regains colleagues and friends, and in reality merely exchanges one sect for another. Such was the fate of Lamennais. One of the wisest acts of Abbe Loyson has been the resistance of this temptation and his refusal to accept the advances which the extreme party always makes to those who have broken away from official ties.
For three years I was subjected to this profound influence, which brought about a complete transformation in my being. M. Dupanloup had literally transfigured me. The poor little country lad struggling vainly to emerge from his shell, had been developed into a young man of ready and quick intelligence. There was, I know, one thing wanting in my education, and until that void was filled up I was very cramped in my powers. The one thing lacking was positive science, the idea of a critical search after truth. This superficial humanism kept my reasoning powers fallow for three years, while at the same time it wore away the early candour of my faith. My Christianity was being worn away, though there was nothing as yet in my mind which could be styled doubt. I went every year, during the holidays, into Brittany. Notwithstanding more than one painful struggle, I soon became my old self again just as my early masters had fashioned me.
In accordance with the general rule I went, after completing my rhetoric at Saint-Nicholas du Chardonnet, to Issy, the country branch of the St. Sulpice seminary. Thus I left M. Dupanloup for an establishment in which the discipline was diametrically opposed to that of Saint-Nicholas. The first thing which I was taught at St. Sulpice was to regard as childish nonsense the very things which M. Dupanloup had told me to prize the most. What, I was taught, could be simpler? If Christianity is a revealed truth, should not the chief occupation of the Christian be the study of that revelation, in other words of theology? Theology and the study of the Bible absorbed my whole time, and furnished me with the true reasons for believing in Christianity and for not adhering to it. For four years a terrible struggle went on within me, until at last the phrase, which I had long put away from me as a temptation of the devil, “It is not true,” would not be denied. In describing this inward combat and the Seminary of St. Sulpice itself, which is further removed from the present age than if encircled by thousands of leagues of solitude, I will endeavour also to show how I arose from the direct study of Christianity, undertaken in the most serious spirit, without sufficient faith to be a sincere priest, and yet with too much respect for it to permit of my trifling with faiths so worthy of that respect.
[Footnote 1: A very graphic description of it has been given by M. Adolphe Morillon in his _Souvenirs de Saint-Nicolas_. Paris. Licoffre.]
[Footnote 2: See the excellent memoir by M. Fonlon (now Archbishop of Besancon) upon Abbe Richard.]
THE ISSY SEMINARY.
PART I.
The Petty Seminary of Saint-Nicholas du Chardonnet had no philosophical course, philosophy being, in accordance with the division of ecclesiastical studies, reserved for the great seminary. After having finished my classical education in the establishment so ably directed by M. Dupanloup, I was, with the students in my class, passed into the great seminary, which is set apart for an exclusively ecclesiastical course of teaching. The grand seminary for the diocese of Paris is St. Sulpice, which consists of two houses, one in Paris and the other at Issy, where the students devote two years to philosophy. These two seminaries form, in reality, one. The one is the outcome of the other, and they are both conjoined at certain times; the congregation from which the masters are selected is the same. St. Sulpice exercised so great an influence over me, and so definitely decided the whole course of my life, that I must perforce sketch its history, and explain its principles and tendencies, so as to show how they have continued to be the mainspring of all my intellectual and moral development.
St. Sulpice owes its origin to one whose name has not attained any great celebrity, for celebrity rarely seeks out those who make a point of avoiding notoriety, and whose predominant characteristic is modesty. Jean-Jacques Olier, member of a family which supplied the state with many trusty servitors, was the contemporary of, and a fellow-worker with, Vincent de Paul, Berulle, Adrien de Bourdoise, Pere Eudes, and Charles de Gondren, founders of congregations for the reform of ecclesiastical education, who played a prominent part in the preparatory reforms of the seventeenth century. During the reign of Henri IV. and in the early years of the reign of Louis XIII., the morality of the clergy was at the lowest possible point. The fanaticism of the League, far from serving to make their morality more rigorous, had just the contrary effect. Priests thought that because they shouldered musket and carbine in the good cause they were at liberty to do as they liked. The racy humour which prevailed during the reign of Henri IV. was anything but favourable to mysticism. There was a good side to the outspoken Rabelaisian gaiety which was not deemed, in that day, incompatible with the priestly calling. In many ways we prefer the bright and witty piety of Pierre Camus, a friend of Francois de Sales, to the rigid and affected attitude which the French clergy has since assumed, and which has converted them into a sort of black army, holding aloof from the rest of the world and at war with it. But there can be no doubt that about the year 1640 the education of the clergy was not in keeping with the spirit of regularity and moderation which was becoming more and more the law of the age. From the most opposite directions came a cry for reform. Francois de Sales admitted that he had not been successful in this attempt, and he told Bourdoise that “after having laboured during seventeen years to train only three such priests as I wanted to assist me in re-forming the clergy of my diocese, I have only succeeded in forming one and-a-half.” Following upon him came the men of grave and reasonable piety whom I named above. By means of congregations of a fresh type, distinct from the old monkish rules and in some points copied from the Jesuits, they created the seminary, that is to say the well-walled nursery in which young clerks could be trained and formed. The transformation was far extending. The schools of these powerful teachers of the spiritual life turned out a body of men representing the best disciplined, the most orderly, the most national, and it maybe added, the most highly educated clergy ever seen–a clergy which illustrated the second half of the seventeenth century and the whole of the eighteenth, and the last of whose representatives have only disappeared within the last forty years. Concurrently with these exertions of orthodox piety arose Port-Royal, which was far superior to St. Sulpice, to St. Lazare, to the Christian doctrine, and even to the Oratoire, as regarded consistency in reasoning and talent in writing, but which lacked the most essential of Catholic virtues, docility. Port-Royal, like Protestantism, passed through every phase of misfortune. It was distasteful to the majority, and was always in opposition. When you have excited the antipathy of your country you are too often led to take a dislike to your country. The persecuted one is doubly to be pitied, for, in addition to the suffering which he endures, persecution affects him morally; it rarely fails to warp the mind and to shrink the heart.
Olier occupies a place apart in this group of Catholic reformers. His mysticism is of a kind peculiar to himself. His _Cathechisme chretien pour la Vie interieure_, which is scarcely ever read outside St. Sulpice, is a most remarkable book, full of poesy and sombre philosophy, wavering from first to last between Louis de Leon and Spinoza. Olier’s ideal of the Christian life is what he calls “the state of death.”
“What is the state of death?–It is a state during which the heart cannot be moved to its depths, and though the world displays to it its beauties, its honours, and its riches, the effect is the same as if it offered them to a corpse, which remains motionless, and devoid of all desire, insensible to all that goes on…. The corpse may be agitated outwardly, and have some movement of the body; but this agitation is all on the surface; it does not come from the inner man, which is without life, vigour, or strength. Thus a soul which is dead within may easily be attached by external things and be disturbed outwardly; but in its inner self it remains dead and motionless to whatever may happen.”
Nor is this all. Olier imagines as far superior to the state of death the state of burial.
“Death retains the appearance of the world and of the flesh; the dead man seems to be still a part of Adam. He is now and again moved; he continues to afford the world some pleasure. But the buried body is forgotten, and no longer ranks with men. He is noisome and horrible; he is bereft of all that pleases the eye; he is trodden under foot in a cemetery without compunction, so convinced is every one that he is nothing, and that he is rooted from among the number of men.”
The sombre fancies of Calvin are as Pelagian optimism compared to the horrible nightmares which original sin evokes in the brain of the pious recluse.
“Could you add anything to drive more closely home the conception as to how the flesh is only sin? It is so completely sin that it is all intent and motion towards sin, and even to every kind of sin; so much so, that if the Holy Ghost did not restrain our souls and succour us with His grace, it would be carried away by all the inclinations of the flesh, all of which tend to sin.
“What is then the flesh?–It is the effect of sin; it is the principle of sin.
“If that is so, how comes it that you did not fall away every hour into sin?–It is the mercy of God which keeps us from it…. I am, therefore, indebted to God if I do not commit every kind of sin?–Yes … this is the general feeling of the saints, because the flesh is drawn down towards sin by such a heavy weight that God alone can prevent it from falling.
“But will you kindly tell me something more about this?–All I can tell you is that there is no conceivable kind of sin, no imperfection, disorder, error, or unruliness of which the flesh is not full, just as there is no levity, folly, or stupidity of which the flesh is not capable at any moment.
“What, I should be mad, and comport myself like a madman in the highways and byways, but for the help of God?–That is a small matter, and a question of common decency; but you must know that without the grace of God and the virtue of His Spirit, there is no impurity, meanness, infamy, drunkenness, blasphemy, or other kind of sin to which man would not give himself over.
“The flesh is very corrupt then?–You see that it is.
“I cannot wonder therefore that you tell us we must hate our flesh and hold our own bodies in horror; and that man, in his present condition, is fated to be accursed, vilified and persecuted.–No, I can no longer feel surprise at this. In truth, there is no form of misfortune and suffering but which he may expect his flesh to bring down upon him. You are right; all the hatred, malediction, and persecution which beset the demon must also beset the flesh and all its motions.
“There is, then, no extremity of insult too great to be put up with and to be looked upon as deserved?–No.
“Contempt, insult, and calumny should not then disturb our peace of mind?–No. We should behave like the saint of former days, who was led to the scaffold for a crime which he had not committed, and from which he would not attempt to exculpate himself, as he said to himself that he should have been guilty of this crime and of many far worse but for the preventing grace of God.
“Men, angels, and God Himself ought, therefore to persecute us without ceasing? Yes, so it ought to be.
“What! do you mean to say that sinners ought to be poor and bereft of everything, like the demons?–Yes, and more than that. Sinners ought to be placed under an interdict in regard to all their corporal and spiritual faculties, and bereft of all the gifts of God.”
A hero of Christian humility, Olier was acting as he thought for the best in making a mock of human nature and dragging it through the mire. He had visions, and was favoured with inner revelations of which the autographic account, written for his director, is still at St. Sulpice. He stops short in his writing to make such reflections as these: “My courage is at times utterly cast down when I see what impertinences I have been writing. They must, I think, be a great waste of time for my good director, whom I am afraid of amusing. I pity him for having to spend his time in reading them, and it seems to me that he ought to stop my writing this intolerable frivolity and impertinence.”
But Olier, like nearly all the mystics, was not merely a strange dreamer, but a powerful organizer. Entering very young into holy orders, he was appointed, through the influence of his family, priest of the parish of St. Sulpice, which was then attached to the Abbey of