A Son Of The Crusaders.
... “On his breast a bloodie crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead, as living, ever him ador'd:
Upon his shield the like was also scor'd.
For soveraine hope which in his helpe he had,
Right faithful true he was in deede and word.”—Spenser.
One day in the month of November, 1833, a stranger descended from the lumbering Schnellpost at the little town of Marburg (Electoral Hesse), on the pleasant banks of the Lahn. Looking around him, he discovered but a single object of interest—the old cathedral of the place, a noble Gothic edifice, which, although stripped and cold in its modern dedication to the Lutheran service, still preserved the salient features of its inalienable beauty and majesty of form.
The traveller, a young man of twenty-three, a Catholic, and an enthusiast in his intelligent and cultivated admiration of the grand architecture of his church, recognized in the building a monument celebrated at once for its pure and perfect beauty, and the first in Germany in which the pointed arch prevailed over the round in the great renovation of art in the XIIIth century.
Contrary to Lutheran observance, the church happened on that day to be open, in compliance with a traditional custom, for the cathedral bore the name of S. Elizabeth, and this was S. Elizabeth's Day. The stranger entered. There was no religious service. There were no worshippers, and children were at play among the old tombs. He wandered through the vast and desolate aisles, which not even the devastation and neglect of centuries had robbed of their marvellous elegance. Naked altars from which no ministering hand now wiped the dust, pillars, defaced statues, nearly obliterated paintings, broken and defaced wood carvings, successively struck his eye and attracted his attention. All these remains of Christian art, even [pg 434] in their ruin telling the story of their origin in days of fresh and fervent faith, appeared also to picture in a certain sequence the events of some devout life. Here was the statue of a young woman in the dress of a widow; further on, in painting, a frightened girl showing to a crowned warrior her robe filled with roses; yet further, these two, the young woman and the warrior, tearing themselves in anguish from a parting embrace. Again, the lady is seen stretched on her bed of death amidst weeping attendants, and, later, an emperor lays his crown on her freshly exhumed coffin.
It was explained to the traveller that these pictured incidents were events in the life of S. Elizabeth, queen of that country, who, that very day six hundred years ago, had died in Marburg and lay buried in the church. A silver shrine, richly sculptured, was shown to him. It had once enclosed the relics of the saint, but one of her descendants, turned Protestant, had torn them from it, and scattered them to the winds. The stone steps approaching the shrine were deeply hollowed by the countless pilgrims who, more than three centuries agone, had come here to kneel in prayer. “Alas!” thought the stranger, “the faith which left its impress on the cold stone has left none upon human hearts!”
He desired to know more of the saintly patroness of Marburg's cathedral, and leaving the church sought out a bookseller, and asked for a life of S. Elizabeth. The man stared at him, bethought himself a moment, and then went up into a garret, from which he presently emerged with a dust-covered pamphlet. “Here it is,” he said, “the only copy I have: no one ever asked for it before.”
The traveller resumed his journey, reading his pamphlet to beguile the tedium of his way. Although written by a Protestant in a cold, unsympathizing, matter-of-fact way, the essential charm of its mere record of youthful self-devotion laid a powerful spell upon him. His artistic enthusiasm, his heart, his piety, were all touched and aroused. Just emerging in sorrow from one of the most trying ordeals of the battle of life, with repelled longings and disappointed hopes, his pent-up youthful energies were now seeking some outlet for escape, some fresh field of action. Uncertain what this field, this outlet, might be, he had vowed that, with the choice before him of several different objects to pursue, he would decide for that which was the most Catholic. He had found it. “To S. Elizabeth he would,” in his own words, “sacrifice his fatigue and his hopes.” He would write her life, and strive to place on record its touching story—at once a tender love-legend, a page of mediæval romance, and the hallowed tradition of a saintly career. At the first stopping-place he left the diligence, and, taking a return carriage, went immediately back to Marburg.
This traveller, this young stranger, was Charles, Count de Montalembert, peer of France. His sudden impulse, his enthusiastic vow, were not as words written in water. To what would at this day seem to many an inconsiderate, quixotic rashness, succeeded the deliberate realization of an undertaking full of labor and difficulty. He ransacked libraries, sought out chronicles, legends, and popular traditions, read old books and long-forgotten manuscripts, and travelled far and wide throughout Germany, wherever a locality offered the attraction of the slightest association with the name of S. Elizabeth. The charm and fascination of his theme grew upon him with every additional [pg 435] fact he learned regarding her. Beginning at the famous old castle of Wartburg, where Elizabeth came a child, the daughter of a race of kings, from distant Hungary, he made a veritable pilgrimage, taking for his route the itinerary of his heroine's life—to Kreuzburg; to Reinhartsbrünn, where, a young wife and mother of twenty, she parted in anguish from her husband, a crusader setting out for Palestine; to Bamberg, where she was driven by persecution; to Andechs, to Erfurth, and finally to Marburg, “whither,” as he says, “he returned to pray by her desecrated tomb, and to gather with pain and difficulty some remembrance of her from the mouths of a people who have renounced with the faith of their fathers the regard due to their benefactress.”
Bow down your heads, O generation of stockbrokers and speculators in provisions and railway shares, to the memory of this Montalembert, who, in the flower of his youthful manhood, for years went up and down the world with an idea in his head and heart!
But this book, this life of S. Elizabeth. you object, was, after all, a mere pious legend of dubious trustworthiness? On the contrary, it was a work of the highest value, even judged by the severest canons of historical criticism. Its introduction alone is sufficient to make the work classic. Sainte-Beuve, high academic and critical authority, calls it majestic,[186] and reviewers of all nations have contributed their verdicts of approval.
This was Montalembert's first literary production—a success, as it deserved to be, worthy forerunner of his yet greater work, The Monks of the West, and the first-fruit of a splendid literary and oratorical career, whose main inspiration was always drawn from the sources of Catholic truth and Catholic faith.
Montalembert died in March, 1870, leaving a name and a reputation which for all time to come will remain one of the proudest illustrations of France.
We are fortunate in already having an admirable memoir of his life,[187] written by one of the most distinguished women of England. It cannot but be gratifying to all who cherish the memory of Montalembert that the task should have fallen into the hands of one so eminently capable as Mrs. Oliphant. Personally intimate with his family and on terms of friendship with his wife (née Comtesse de Merode), thoroughly familiar with the language, modern history, and politics of France, and the successful translator of The Monks of the West, it would have been difficult to find a writer better fitted, in knowledge and in sympathy, to record the life of Charles de Montalembert. Let us add here that, for reasons which the intelligent reader may easily divine, we are glad that the biography has been written by a Protestant. Although to a Catholic reader it would be more pleasant to read a life in which nothing could be found which is not in perfect harmony with the spirit of faith and loyalty toward the church, yet, for the public generally, the testimony of a fair and candid Protestant in respect to certain very important events in the career of Montalembert will be more free from the suspicion of bias, and therefore of more value in establishing the fact of his essential devotion [pg 436] to the Holy See to the end of his life.
We trust that the ladies of Sorosis and of the various wings and vanguards of the grand army of “The Rights of Women” will not take offence if we endeavor to compliment Mrs. Oliphant by saying that we especially admire the style in which her memoir is written, for a tone and quality which—turn whither we may—we cannot otherwise describe than as “manly.” Making due allowance for the almost inevitable partiality of the biographer for his hero, there is a directness, a solidity, a sound common-sense view of practical questions, and an absence of mere sentimentality, all eminently to her credit and in admirable keeping with the dignity of her subject. Mrs. Oliphant's modesty, too, equals her ability. Referring to her translation of The Monks of the West, she tells us: “We are sorry to add, to our personal humiliation, that Montalembert was by no means so much satisfied with at least the first part of the translation. He acknowledged that the meaning was faithfully rendered; ‘but,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot admire the constant use of French or Latin words instead of your own vernacular. My Anglo-Saxon feelings are wounded to the quick by the useless admission of the article the or a; and by such words as chagrin instead of grief, malediction instead of curse, etc.’ The proofs of the translation came back from him laden with corrections in red ink—a circumstance which communicated to them a certain additional sharpness, at least to the troubled imagination of the translator; and the present writer may be perhaps allowed here to avow in her own person that up to this present moment, when she happens to have the smallest French phrase to translate, she pauses with instinctive alarm, hastily substituting freedom for liberty when the word occurs; and will cast about in her mind, with a certain sensation of fright, how to find words for authority, corruption, intelligence, etc., in other than the French form.”
Charles Forbes René de Montalembert was born in London on the 15th of May, 1810. His father was a noble French emigré; his mother, the daughter of James Forbes, an Englishman of distinction. The first nine years of his life were spent principally in England under the immediate care and in the personal companionship of his maternal grandfather, and, dating from this period, the English language was always to him a second mother tongue. At the age of fourteen we find him at the college of S. Barbe in Paris. The fact may be discouraging to many young gentlemen of the present day now at school and in sad possession of a class of ideas too generally accepted, to the effect that men become useful and distinguished by reason of the possession of some unaided special gift rather than by study and the laborious acquisition of knowledge—we say the fact may be discouraging to them, but nevertheless it remains a fact that the young Montalembert laid the foundation of his future distinction as a man of letters, an archæologist, a great orator, a great writer, an eminent political leader, and the ornament of the Chamber of Peers, in close, unremitting, laborious application to his studies while at school. After he had completed his college course and entered society, we find him writing to a friend: “It is usual to say that youth is the time for the pleasures of society. I look upon this opinion as a complete paradox. It seems to me, on the contrary, that youth should be given up with ardor to study, or to preparation [pg 437] for a profession. When a young man has paid his tribute to his country; when he can appear in society crowned with the laurels of debate or of the battle-field, or at least of universal esteem; when he feels entitled to command respect, if not admiration—then is the time to enter society with satisfaction.”
Soon there came for him the period of illusions perdues, which, commencing with the entrance into life of every intelligent and ambitious young man, accompanies him with more or less persistence to the edge of the grave. Young Montalembert spent some time in Sweden, at whose court his father was the ambassador of Charles X. On his return to France, he wrote an article upon that country which M. Guizot, the editor of the Revue Française, advised him to cut down to half its length. He complied, sent in his abbreviated article, and the editor suppressed the best portion of what remained!
About this time he met Lamartine, became intimate with Victor Hugo, “then the poet of all sweet and virtuous things,” and numbered among his friends Sainte-Beuve, who then shared Montalembert's religious enthusiasm and his belief that Europe was to be regenerated by the church. Ireland, too, came in for a full share of his sympathy. He wrote an article on that country which Guizot allowed to go in entire. A friend tells him that his article on Sweden is dull, and that on Ireland commonplace. “Disappointing,” writes the young author in his diary, “but better than if my friend had praised me insincerely.” O'Connell, then in the fulness of his powers and his popularity, greatly attracted him. He would go all the way to Ireland to see him. And he did. Crossing the two channels, and traversing England, he made the journey over the mountains of Kerry on horseback, with a little Irish boy for his guide. He visited O'Connell at Derrynane, prepared and anxious to discuss with him the great subjects which filled his mind. The Liberator received him kindly, and after dinner—looking at the ingenuous face of twenty before him—did what he thought precisely the proper thing to do—ushered him at once into the drawing-room, where the young count was thrown on the tender mercies of a crowd of pretty and gay young Irish women. Encore une illusion perdue! He had crossed seas and mountains to discuss freedom, the church, English rule and Irish emancipation, with Ireland's greatest man, who, without listening to a word from him, thrust him into another room amid a bevy of laughing girls!
After Montalembert's return from Ireland came his intimacy with Lacordaire and Lamennais, and the joint literary enterprise of the three in the establishment of the Avenir, whose motto was “God and Liberty.” Its first number was issued Oct. 15, 1830. We will not dwell on its history, so familiar to all Catholics, except to refer to the holy war waged by it and its friends against the monopoly of education by the government. Under the law, every private school, every educational institution not licensed and regulated by the University of Paris, was absolutely forbidden. Utter irreligiousness then pervaded the colleges and schools of France. The generation which passed through those schools bears witness to their evil influences, and confirms Lacordaire's own record, who says that he left college “with religion destroyed in his soul,” and that he, like almost all the youths of his period, “lost his faith at school.”
Montalembert's picture of these [pg 438] evil influences was everywhere recognized as truthful. “Is there a single establishment of the university where a Christian child can live in the exercise of faith? Does not a contagious doubt, a cold and tenacious impiety, reign over all these young souls whom she pretends to instruct? Are they not too often either polluted, or petrified, or frozen? Is not the most flagrant, the most monstrous, the most unnatural immorality inscribed in the records of every college, and in the recollections of every child who has passed as much as eight days there?”
To test the law forbidding freedom in education, Lacordaire and Montalembert opened a free school for poor children at Paris in the Rue des Arts. They were indicted for the offence, and tried at the bar of the Chamber of Peers. The audience, as may well be imagined, was made up from the nobility and intelligence of the land. The prisoners defended their cause in person. Lacordaire, who spoke first, referred to the fact that the government had lately impeached the previous ministers by virtue of power in the charter not reduced to a special law. “If they could do it, so could I,” said the brave priest, “with this difference, that they asked blood, while I desired to give a free education to the children of the poor.” He ended by recalling to his judges the example of Socrates “in the first struggle for freedom to preach.” “In that cause célèbre by which Socrates fell,” said Lacordaire, “he was evidently culpable against the gods, and in consequence against the laws of his country. Nevertheless, posterity, both pagan and Christian, has stigmatized his judges and accusers; and of all concerned have absolved only the culprit and the executioner—the culprit, because he had failed to keep the laws of Athens only in obedience to a higher law; and the executioner, because he presented the cup to the victim with tears.”
With this proud and plain warning ringing in their ears, the judges next heard Montalembert. He was just twenty-one, and by the recent death of his father but a few weeks in his place as a peer of France. Sainte-Beuve saw that his youth, his ease and grace, the elegant precision of his style and diction, veiled the fact that it was a prisoner—not a peer—who spoke, and his judges were the first to forget it.
“The entire chamber listened with a surprise which was not without pleasure to the young man's bold self-justification. From that day M. de Montalembert, though formally condemned, was borne in the very heart of the peerage—he was its Benjamin.” The sentence was a gentle reprimand and a mild fine of a hundred francs.
The Avenir, it will be remembered, had incurred no censure from Rome. Nevertheless, it had not prospered, and it was resolved by its founders that they would appeal to the head of the church for his explicit approval. Accordingly, the publication of the paper was suspended, and its last number announced “with pomp,” as Lacordaire says, that “the purpose of its editors was to suspend it until they had gone to Rome to seek sanction and authority for its continuation.” The biographer well remarks that “neither from primitive Ireland nor romantic Poland had such an expedition set forth.” They asked the head of the church “to commit himself, to sanction a new and revolutionary movement, to bless the very banners of revolt, and acknowledge as pioneers of his army the ecclesiastical Ishmaels who had [pg 439] carried fire and flame everywhere during their brief career.” There could, of course, be but one result—failure. The Avenir was condemned. Lacordaire and Montalembert at once submitted to the decision. Poor de Lamennais did not, and unhappily persisted in his sad mistake. In connection with this subject, we cannot here refrain from repeating at length some reflections which, coming as they do from an intelligent Protestant, have a peculiar force and value.
They are from the pen of Montalembert's biographer, and present so admirable, so eloquent a résumé of the question of apostasy, that we have not the heart to curtail the passage containing them by so much as the omission of a single word:
“Except at the Reformation, when the great overflow of spiritual rebellion was favored by such a combination of circumstances as has never occurred since, no man or group of men have succeeded in rebelling against Rome, and yet continued to keep up a religious character and influence. No man has been able to do it, whatever the excellence of his beginning might be, or the purity of the motives with which he started. Even in the Church of England the career of a man who separates himself from her communion is generally a painful one. He makes a commotion and excitement in the world for a time before he has fully made up his mind; and at the moment of his withdrawal he is sure of remark and notice, at all events, from certain classes. But after that brief moment he sinks flat as the spirits do in the Inferno, and the dark wave pours over him, and he is heard of no more. All that sustained and strengthened and gave him a fictitious importance as the member of a great corporation has fallen away from him. He has dropped like a stone into the water—like a foundered ship into the sea. In England, however, after all has been done, there is a sea of dissent to drop into, and though his new surroundings may please him little, yet he will come out of the giddiness of his downfall to take some comfort in them—will accustom himself by degrees to the lower social level, the different spiritual atmosphere. But he who dissents from the Church of Rome has no such refuge. The moment he steps outside her fold he finds himself in outer darkness, through which awful salutations are shrieked to him by the enemies of religion, by those whom he has avoided and condemned all his life, and with whom he can agree only on the one sole article of rebellion. If he ventures to hold up his head at all after what all his friends will call his apostasy, the best that he can hope for is to be courted by heretics, professed enemies of the church which he has been born in, and which probably he loves most dearly still, notwithstanding his disobedience. To quarrel with your home is one thing—to find its domestic laws hard, and its prejudices insupportable; but to plunge into the midst of the enemies of that home, and to hear it assailed with the virulence of ignorance—to join in gibes against your mother, and mockery of her life and motives—is a totally different matter. Yet this is almost all that a contumacious priest has to look forward to. A recent and striking example, to which we need not refer more plainly, will occur to every one who has watched the contemporary history of the Roman Catholic Church. In this case a brilliant and remarkable preacher—a man supposed the other day to be one of the most eminent and promising sons of Rome—after wavering and falling away in some points from ecclesiastical obedience, suddenly appeared in an admiring circle of gentle Anglicanism, surrounded by a fair crowd of worshipping Protestants, ready to extend to him all that broad and universal sympathy which he had no doubt been trained to regard as vilest latitudinarianism, or the readiness of Pilate to make friends with Herod. This prospect must chill the very soul of a man who has received the true priestly training, and who has been educated in that love of his church which is of itself a noble and generous sentiment. The best thing that can happen to him is to fall among heretics; the other alternative, and the only one, so far as events have yet made it apparent, to fall among infidels: and as his education has taught him to make but small distinction between them, and the infidels are nearer at hand, and his own countrymen, what wonder if it is into [pg 440]their hands that the miserable man, torn from all his ancient foundations, ejected from his natural place, heart-weary with the madness which is wrought by anger against those we love, should fall—what wonder if he should rush to the furthest extremity, hiding what he feels to be his shame, and endeavoring to take some dismal comfort in utter negation of that past from which he has been torn! Whether there are new developments in the future for the new Protesters whom a recent decision has raised up, we cannot tell. But such has been the case in the past. Life is over for the rebellious priest who breaks with his church; his possibility of service in his vocation has come to an end; even the most careless peasant in his parish will turn from him. He is a deserter from his regiment in the face of the enemy, false to his colors, a man no longer of any human use.”
It was during Montalembert's sojourn in Italy, on his remarkable Avenir pilgrimage, that he became the intimate friend of Albert de la Ferronays, the hero of Mrs. Craven's beautiful Récit d'une Sœur. He appears in the book designated under the name of Montal. From the same period, also, dates his intimacy with Rio, the future historian of Christian art. The young peer's taste for art, always strong, and his enthusiastic admiration of the glorious remains of mediæval architecture, were both developed and strengthened under the teaching and influence of Rio. In March, 1833, he published an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which he energetically denounced the desecration and ruin of the grand old architectural monuments of France. It was addressed in the form of a letter to Victor Hugo, then leader of the Romantic school, who strongly sympathized with him on this subject, and whose Notre Dame de Paris had been reviewed in the Avenir by Montalembert with enthusiastic praise for the grand historical framework of the story. During the autumn of that year, Montalembert went to Germany, and, as we have seen, accidentally stopped at Marburg. Travel, research, and the collection of materials for the life of Elizabeth now engrossed all his time, until, attaining the legal age, twenty-five, he took his seat in the Chamber of Peers. His first appearance at the bar of this chamber had been in defence of the liberty of teaching, and his first speech was in defence of the liberty of the press. These two discourses prefigured his parliamentary career. He was always the ardent advocate of liberty; rarely heard on the side of the government; and generally the leader of a conscientious and loyal opposition: which, well considered, would have been found the most prudent adviser of the administration in power.
Strongly imbued with English ideas, he fully appreciated the conservative power of an energetic opposition, ever ready to criticise, to question, to challenge, or to expose whatever might seem arbitrary or unconstitutional in the acts of the government. But this idea of an opposition at once loyal and law-loving, was unfamiliar to his countrymen. To them, as a general thing, opposition meant revolution, and to many the spectacle of a peer of France, a Catholic, and a proprietaire, who was at once the friend of the proletaire, the dissenter, the oppressor, and the slave, was a paradox. And yet paradox there was none, for his declaration of principles was always clear and bold. Thus, in striving to cull from the Chamber of Peers a public expression of sympathy for the Poles, he insisted that it was their right and their duty to make an avowal of national sentiments, an expression of national opinion, that it was an obligation imposed by humanity and required by wise policy. “What is it,” he asked, “that has raised [pg 441] the British parliament to so high a degree of popularity and moral influence in Europe? Is it not because for more than a century no grave event has happened in any country without finding an echo there? Is it not because no right has been oppressed, no treaty broken anywhere, without a discussion on both sides of the question before the peers and commons of England, whose assemblies have thus become, in the silence of the world, a sort of tribunal where all the great causes of humanity are pleaded, and where opinion pronounces those formidable judgments which, sooner or later, are always executed?”
And his independence was that of the man as well as of the orator. He was committed to no policy, sought no party ends, but always, and at all cost, maintained the good, the just, the honorable. A lost or desperate cause, if equitable, was always sure of his support. The three oppressed nations of the earth, Poland under Russia, Ireland under England, and Greece under Turkey, were his most cherished clients. The weaker side ever strongly attracted him. “Penetrated by the conviction that just causes are everlasting,” says M. Cochin, “and that every protest against injustice ends by moving heaven and convincing men, he sought out, so to speak, every oppressed cause when at its last breath, to take its burden upon himself, and to become its champion. There is a suffering race, a race lost in distant isles, the race of black slaves, which has been oppressed for centuries. He took its cause in hand, and from the year 1837 labored for its emancipation. There are in all manufacturing places a crowd of hollow-cheeked children, with pale faces and worn eyes, and the sight of them made a profound impression upon him; he took their cause also in hand. If you run over the mere index of his speeches, you will find all generous efforts contained in it.”
The year 1836 brought two notable events in the life of Montalembert—the publication of his first work, his Life of S. Elizabeth, and his marriage to a daughter of the noble house of de Merode in Belgium. Meantime, he continued his attacks on vandalism in art and his parliamentary labors, and was mainly instrumental in the creation of the committee of historical art and the commission on historical monuments, from both of which he was excluded under the Empire, which no more sympathized with his pure conceptions of Christian art than it did with his conception of Christian morals.
Rio has recorded the result of the impression made by Montalembert upon the English poet Rogers, which admirably illustrates the fact that Montalembert's religion was not a sort of moral “Sunday suit” to be put off and on as occasion might require, and at the same time reveals to us the old poet in an entirely new aspect. The Montalemberts had spent the evening with Rogers, “and after their departure,” Rio relates, “when I found myself alone with Rogers, the expression of his countenance, which up to that moment had been smiling and animated, changed so suddenly that I feared I had offended him by some word of doubtful meaning which I might not altogether have understood. He paced about the room without saying anything, and I did not know whether I might venture to break this incomprehensible silence. At last he broke it himself, and said to me that, if he had the power of putting himself in the place of another, he would choose that of Montalembert, not on account of his youth and his beautiful wife, [pg 442] but because he possessed that immovable and cloudless faith that seemed to himself the most enviable of all gifts.”
Mr. Neale advised Montalembert that he had been elected an honorary member of the Cambridge Camden Society. On receipt of the news of this “unsolicited and unmerited honor,” Montalembert replied in a letter protesting against the usurpation of the title “Catholic” by the Camden Society. Here are some of its trenchant passages:
“The attempt to steal away from us, and appropriate to the use of a fraction of the Church of England, the glorious title of Catholic, is proved to be an usurpation by every monument of the past and present, by the coronation oath of your sovereigns, by all the laws that have established your church. The name itself is spurned with indignation by the greater half at least of those who belong to the Church of England, just as the Church of England itself is rejected with scorn and detestation by the greater half of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The judgment of the whole indifferent world, the common sense of humanity, agrees with the judgment of the Church of Rome, and with the sense of her 150 millions of children, to dispossess you of this name. The Church of England, who has denied her mother, is rightly without a sister. She has chosen to break the bonds of unity and obedience. Let her therefore stand alone before the judgment-seat of God and man. Even the debased Russian Church—that church where lay-despotism has closed the church's mouth and turned her into a slave—disdains to recognize the Anglicans as Catholics. Even the Eastern heretics, although so sweetly courted by Puseyite missionaries, sneer at this new and fictitious Catholicism. That the so-called Anglo-Catholics, whose very name betrays their usurpation and their contradiction, whose doctrinal articles, whose liturgy, whose whole history, are such as to disconnect them from all mankind except those who are born English and speak English—that they should pretend on the strength of their private judgment alone to be what the rest of mankind deny them to be, will assuredly be ranked among the first follies of the XIXth century.... You may turn aside for three hundred years to come, as you have done for three hundred years past, from the fountain of living waters; but to dig out a small channel of your own, for your own private insular use, wherein the living truth will run apart from its own docile and ever obedient children—that will no more be granted to you than it has been to the Arians, the Nestorians, the Donatists, or any other triumphant heresy. I protest, therefore, against the usurpation of a sacred name by the Camden Society as iniquitous; and I next protest against the object of this society, and all such efforts in the Anglican Church, as absurd.”
We now have before us a period of seven years in the life of Montalembert, the record of which may be said to be the history of the great public questions which then agitated France; so intimately was his entire parliamentary career bound up with their development. The first and most important of these questions was that of education. Then, as now, the examination for the degree of A.B. (baccalaureat) was the key to all public occupations.
But at that time, from 1830 to 1848, no one had a right to present himself for this examination unless he had been educated in one of the public lycées, or some school licensed by the university, into whose hands the government had placed the monopoly of education. A wealthy parent might educate a boy under his own supervision in the best universities of England or Germany, or by private tutors, yet the youth would not be permitted to present himself for examination, although able to pass it with ease. And the degree resulting from this examination was the essential condition upon which the possibility of a public career was opened to every young Frenchman. Without it he could by no possibility be admitted [pg 443] to any public employment, the bench or the bar. Ability, accomplishments, acquirements, had nothing to do with the question. The young man must pass through a state school, or he was for ever debarred from a public career in his own country. But to pass through a state school, as all Christian parents, both Catholic and Protestant, then well knew in France, was to leave it with the loss of his religious principles. The biographer may well find it “equally incredible that such restrictions should have been borne by any people, and that a government founded upon liberal principles and erected by revolution should have dared to maintain them; but so it was.”
The parliamentary campaign on the educational question opened in 1844. Discussion soon reached a point of warmth. “There is one result given under the auspices of the university,” said Montalembert, “which governs every other, and which is as clear as daylight. It is that children who leave their family with the seed of faith in them, to enter the university, come out of it infidels.” The contradictions and mouvement incited by this statement pushed the orator to more emphatic statement. “I appeal,” he said, “to the testimony of all fathers and mothers. Let us take any ten children out of the schools regulated by the university, at the end of their studies, and find one Christian among them if you can. One in ten! and that would be a prodigy. I address myself not to such or such a religious belief, but to all. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, all who believe humbly and sincerely in the religion which they possess, it is to them I appeal, whom I recognize as my brethren. And all those who have a sincere belief, and practise it, will confirm what I have said of the religious results of the education of the university. Let us hear the testimony of the young and eloquent defender of French Protestantism, the son of our colleague M. Agenor de Gasparin.... ‘Religious education,’ he says, ‘has no existence in the colleges.... I bethink myself with terror what I was when I issued forth from this national education. I recollect what all my companions were. Were we very good citizens? I know not, but certainly we were not Christians; we did not possess even the weakest beginnings of evangelical faith.’ ”
The results of the French compulsory anti-Christian education may be read in current history. “The men it has brought up are the men who allowed France to be bound for eighteen years in the humiliating bondage of the Second Empire; who have furnished excuses to all the world for calling her the most socially depraved of nations; who have filled her light literature with abominations, and her graver works with blasphemy; and who have finally procured for her national downfall and humiliation.”
Montalembert planted his little band in battle array against the compact and overwhelming forces of the government, under the inspiration and trumpet-tongued tones of his admirable fils des croisés speech in the Chamber of Peers. Here, with its memorable termination, are a few passages from it. We regret we cannot give it entire. “Allow me to tell you, gentlemen, a generation has arisen among you of men whom you know not. Let them call us Neo-Catholics, sacristans, ultramontanes, as you will; the name is nothing; the thing exists. We take for our motto that with which the generous Poles in the last century headed their manifesto of resistance to the Empress Catherine: ‘We, who love [pg 444] freedom more than all the world, and the Catholic religion more than freedom,’ ... are we to acknowledge ourselves so degenerated from the condition of our fathers, that we must give up our reason to rationalism, deliver our conscience to the university, our dignity and our freedom into the hands of law-makers whose hatred for the freedom of the church is equalled only by their profound ignorance of her rights and her doctrines?... You are told to be implacable. Be so; do all that you will and can against us. The church will answer you by the mouth of Tertullian and the gentle Fénelon. ‘You have nothing to fear from us; but we do not fear you.’ And I add in the name of Catholic laymen like myself, Catholics of the XIXth century: We will not be helots in the midst of a free people. We are the successors of the martyrs, and we do not tremble before the successors of Julian the Apostate. We are the sons of the crusaders, and we will never yield to the progeny of Voltaire!”
“Mouvements divers” might well—according to the reported proceedings of the day—follow this burst of indignant eloquence. The words made the very air of France tingle; they defined at once the two sides with one of those happy strokes which make the fortune of a party, and which are doubly dear to all who speak the language of epigram—the most brilliantly clear, incisive, and distinct of tongues. Henceforward the fils des croisés were a recognized power, but they were only known and heard by and through Montalembert, and, so far as the public struggle was concerned, might be said to exist in him alone. Montalembert fought almost single-handed. “The attitude of this one man between that phalanx of resolute opponents and the shifty mass of irresolute followers, is as curious and interesting as any political position ever was. He stands before us turning from one to the other, never wearied, never flagging, maintaining an endless brilliant debate, now with one set of objectors, now with another, prompt with his answers to every man's argument, rapid as lightning in his sweep upon every man's fallacy: now proclaiming himself the representative of the Catholics in France, and pouring forth his claim for them as warm, as urgent, as vehement as though a million of men were at his back: and now turning upon these very Catholics with keen reproaches, with fiery ridicule, with stinging darts of contempt for their weakness. Thus he fought single-handed, confronting the entire world. Nothing daunted him, neither failure nor abuse, neither the resentment of his enemies, nor the languor of his friends, ... not always parliamentary in his language, bold enough to say everything, as his adversaries reproached him, yet never making a false accusation or imputing a mean motive. No one hotter in assault, none more tremendous in the onslaught; but he did not know what it was to strike a stealthy or back-handed blow.”
Time has strange revenges. In April, 1849, came up the important question of the inamovibilité de la magistrature—the appointment for life of magistrates. His old enemies were delighted to find that Montalembert declared himself unreservedly in the affirmative, and none more than M. Dupin, the very man who uttered the memorable “Soyez implacables.” Again he had the government to contend with, for under the law magistrates were no longer irremovable. Montalembert proposed, [pg 445] as an amendment, that all magistrates in office should be reappointed, and that all new appointments should be made for life. He pointed out the evils of a system which made judgeships tenable only from one revolution to another, and made a noble office the object of a “hunt” for promotion dishonoring to all parties. He spoke of the magistracy as the priesthood (sacerdoce) of justice, and added: “Allow me to pause a moment upon the word priesthood, which I have just employed. Of all the weaknesses and follies of the times in which we live, there is none more hateful to me than the conjunction of expressions and images borrowed from religion with the most profane facts and ideas. But I acknowledge that our old and beautiful French language, the immortal and intelligent interpreter of the national good sense, has, by a marvellous instinct, assimilated religion and justice. It has always said: The temples of the law, the sanctuary of justice, the priesthood of the magistracy.” The cause was won by his eloquence, and thus the first political success he ever gained was not for himself or his friends, but for his enemies. Truly a fitting triumph for a son of the crusaders.
The peerage now being abolished, Montalembert was returned as deputy to the National Assembly by the Department of Doubs. Here his career was, if possible, yet more brilliant than in the Chamber of Peers. It would require a volume fitly to record them. Soon came the presidency of Louis Bonaparte. Himself the soul of honor, with an eye single to the welfare of France, deceived by solemn assurances which he unfortunately credited, unsuspicious of a depth of treachery which he could not conceive, and alarmed by the horrible spectre of socialism, just arising from its native blood and mire, Montalembert became the dupe and the victim of Louis Napoleon. When power had been fully secured, the new president offered him the position of senator, along with the dotation of 30,000 francs, which was refused without hesitation. A second and a third time the offer was renewed, the last offer being urged by De Morny in person. The only position he held under the government of Louis Napoleon was the nominal one of a member of the Consultative Commission, which he resigned on the publication of the decree for the confiscation of the property of the House of Orleans. He had already begun to suffer from the attacks of the disease to which he finally succumbed; and it was from his sick-bed that he went to receive at the hands of the French Academy the highest and most dearly prized reward of French talent and genius. Montalembert was elected to the seat in the Academy vacated by the death of M. Droz, and his reception was an event. Being now freed from the absorbing engagements of life, he made several journeys to England, and travelled into Hungary, Poland, and Spain. His work entitled L'Avenir Politique de l'Angleterre was the fruit of his English visits; and was well received both in France and England. In October, 1858, the Paris Correspondant published a remarkable letter from Montalembert, describing a debate in the English Parliament. Its every paragraph was so full of a subtle and powerful contrast between political liberty in England and the absence of it in France that the Imperial government and its adherents were stung to the quick. He speaks of leaving “an atmosphere foul with servile and corrupting miasma (chargée de miasmes serviles et corrupteurs) to breathe a purer [pg 446] air and to take a bath of free life in England.” Referring to a former French colony, he says: “In Canada, a noble race of Frenchmen and Catholics, unhappily torn from our country, but remaining French in heart and habits, owes to England the privilege of having retained or acquired, along with perfect religious freedom, all the political and municipal liberties which France herself has repudiated.” A criminal prosecution was immediately begun against the count for this letter. Four separate accusations were brought. Among them were “exciting the people to hate and despise the government of the emperor, and of attempting to disturb the public peace.” The legal penalties were imprisonment from three months to five years, fine from 500 to 6,000 francs, and expulsion from France. According to French custom, the prisoner on trial was interrogated concerning the obnoxious passages, and, when Montalembert answered, it was discovered that the emperor and his government, not the prisoner at the bar, was on trial. With calm gravity he acknowledged each damning implication as an historical fact not to be denied, “enjoying, there can be no doubt,” says his biographer, “to the bottom of his heart, this unlooked-for chance of adding a double point to every arrow he had launched, and planting his darts deliberately and effectually in the joints of his adversaries' armor.”
The foundation of Montalembert's great work, The Monks of the West, was laid in his studies for the life of S. Elizabeth, and the remainder of his active life was now devoted to its completion. It is sufficient to refer to it. We need not dwell upon this greatest production of his literary genius. Besides this, two other remarkable productions came from his pen toward the close of his career. These were the long and eloquent addresses, L'Eglise libre dans l'Etat libre, delivered before the Congress of Malines, and his Victoire du Nord aux Etats-Unis, which, says his biographer, “is little else than a hymn of triumph in honor of that success which to him was a pure success of right over wrong, of freedom over slavery.”
It is well known that Montalembert was one of those who opposed the proclamation of the dogma of infallibility. On this point, his biographer gives us this interesting information.
One of his visitors said to him, while lying on what proved to be his death-bed: “If the Infallibility is proclaimed, what will you do?” “I will struggle against it as long as I can,” he said; but when the question was repeated, the sufferer raised himself quickly, with something of his old animation, and turned to his questioner. “What should I do?” he said. “We are always told that the pope is a father. Eh bien!—there are many fathers who demand our adherence to things very far from our inclination, and contrary to our ideas. In such a case, the son struggles while he can; he tries hard to persuade his father; discusses and talks the matter over with him; but when all is done, when he sees no possibility of succeeding, but receives a distinct refusal, he submits. I shall do the same.”
“You will submit so far as form goes,” said the visitor. “You will submit externally. But how will you reconcile that submission with your ideas and convictions?”
Still more distinctly and clearly he replied: “I will make no attempt to reconcile them. I will submit my will, as has to be done in respect to all the other questions of faith. I [pg 447] am not a theologian; it is not my part to decide on such matters. And God does not ask me to understand. He asks me to submit my will and intelligence, and I will do so.” “After having made this solemn though abrupt confession of faith,” says the witness whom we have quoted, “he added, with a smile, ‘It is simple enough; there is nothing extraordinary in it.’ ”
The last years of the life of this distinguished man were one long protracted agony of physical suffering. The symptoms of disease that first manifested themselves in 1852 had gone on increasing in severity until in 1869, more than a year before his death, he speaks of himself as vivens sepulcrum. “I am fully warranted in saying that the death of M. de Montalembert was part of his glory,” writes M. Cochin, in describing his constancy and resignation. He died on the 13th of March, 1870.