Ladies and Gentlemen,—I have accepted with great pleasure the invitation to address you in this illustrious institution devoted to the noblest researches of science and of true philosophy. I have dreamed since my childhood of this island, where I have so many friends, and which I visit so tardily.
I am a Briton of France. In our old books, England is always called the Island of the Saints; and, in truth, all our saints of Armorican Brittany, those saints of doubtful orthodoxy, who, if they were again alive, would be more in harmony with us than with the Jesuits, came from the Island of Britain. I have seen in their chapel the trough of stone in which they crossed the sea. Of all races, the Britain race is that which has ever taken religion the most seriously. Even when the progress of reflection has shown us that some articles among the catalogues of things which we have always regarded as fixed should be modified, we never break away from the symbol under which we have from the first approved the ideal.
For our faith is not contained in obscure metaphysical propositions: it is in the affirmations of the heart. I have therefore chosen for my discourse to you, not one of those subtleties which divide, but one of those themes, dear to the soul, which bring nearer, and reconcile. I shall speak to you of that book resplendent with the divine spirit, that manual of submissive life which the most godly of men has left us,—the Cæsar, Marcus Aurelius Antonine. It is the glory of sovereigns that the most irreproachable model of virtue may be found in their ranks, and that the most beautiful lessons of patience and of self-control may come from a condition which one naturally believes to be subject to all the seductions of pleasure and of vanity.
I.
The inheritance of wisdom with a throne is always rare: I find in history but two striking examples of it,—in India, the succession of the three Mongol emperors, Bâber, Hoomâyoon, and Akbar; at Rome, at the head of the greatest empire that ever existed, the two admirable reigns of Antonine the Pious and Marcus Aurelius. Of the last two, I consider Antonine the greatest. His goodness did not lead him into faults: he was not tormented with that internal trouble which disturbed without ceasing the heart of his adopted son. This strange malady, this restless study of himself, this demon of scrupulousness, this fever of perfection, are signs of a less strong and distinguished nature. As the finest thoughts are those which are not written, Antonine had in this respect also a superiority over Marcus Aurelius. But let us add that we should be ignorant of Antonine, if Marcus Aurelius had not transmitted to us that exquisite portrait of his adopted father, in which he seems to have applied himself, through humility, to painting the picture of a better man than himself.
It is he who has sketched in the first book of his "Thoughts,"—that admirable background where the noble and pure forms of his father, mother, grandfather, and tutors, move in a celestial light. Thanks to Marcus Aurelius, we are able to understand how these old Roman families, who had seen the reign of the wicked emperors, still retained honesty, dignity, justice, the civil, and, if I may dare to say it, the republican spirit. They lived there in admiration of Cato, of Brutus, of Thrasea, and of the great stoics whose souls had never bowed under tyranny. The reign of Domitian was abhorred by them. The sages who had endured it without submission were honored as heroes. The accession of the Antonines was only the coming to power of the society of sages, of whose just anger Tacitus has informed us,—a society of wise men formed by the league of all those who had revolted against the despotism of the first Cæsars.
The salutary principle of adoption made the imperial court of the second century a true cradle of virtue. The noble and learned Nerva, in establishing this principle, assured the happiness of the human race during almost a hundred years, and gave to the world the best century of progress of which any knowledge has been preserved. The sovereignty thus possessed in common by a group of choice men who delegated it or shared it, according to the needs of the moment, lost a part of that attraction which renders it so dangerous.
Men came to the throne without seeking it, but also without the right of birth, or in any sense the divine right: men came there understanding themselves, experienced, having been long prepared. The empire was a civil burden which each accepted in his turn, without dreaming of hastening the hour. Marcus Aurelius was made emperor so young, that the idea of ruling had scarcely occurred to him, and had not for a moment exercised its charm upon his mind.
At eight years, when he was already præsul of the Salian priests, Hadrian remarked this sad child, and loved him for his good-nature, his docility, and his incapability of falsehood. At eighteen years the empire was assured to him. He awaited it patiently for twenty-two years. The evening when Antonine, feeling himself about to die, after having given to the tribune the watchword, Æquanimitas, commanded the golden statue of Fortune, which was always in the apartment of the emperor, to be borne into that of his adopted son, he experienced neither surprise nor joy.
He had long been sated with all joys, without having tasted them: he had seen the absolute vanity of them by the profoundness of his philosophy.