[CHAPTER VIII]
VINET AND SAINTE-BEUVE—JUSTE OLIVIER
The centre of the intellectual life was always the University. It could not be otherwise in a country in which every man is born a pedagogue. In England the view has come to prevail that literature only begins to be vital when it ceases to be academic. In the Canton of Vaud the literature is academic or nothing, and even the poets are professors, unbending in their hours of sentimental ease; while the literature of revolt is the bitter cry of professors who have forfeited their chairs on account of their religious or political opinions. As the result of each revolution in turn we see a company of professors put to flight. The casualties of that sort are at least as numerous as the broken heads.
The detailed relation of such professorial vicissitudes belongs, however, to the native antiquary. Here it will suffice to recall a few more notable names.
A Swiss historian would doubtless say that the greatest of the names is that of Alexandre Vinet. In his hot youth he wrote riotous poetry:
'O mes amis, vidons bouteille
Et laissons faire le destin.
Le Dieu qui préside à la treille
Est notre unique souverain.'
Afterwards he became austere, and played a great part in theological controversy. He hated the Revivalists, whom he described as 'lunatics at large'; but he insisted that religious liberty should be the heritage of all, and, while opposing established churches, exercised a profound spiritual influence. He was a great Broad Churchman, and we may class him as the F. W. Robertson or F. D. Maurice of the Canton of Vaud. Sainte-Beuve blew his trumpet, and he, on his part, almost persuaded Sainte-Beuve to become a Protestant.
Sainte-Beuve, it is hardly too much to say, came to Lausanne in search of a religion. St. Simonism had disappointed him, and so had the Liberal Catholicism of Lamennais. Lamennais, in fact, had gone too fast and too far for him—had, as it were, he said, taken him for a drive, and spilt him in a ditch, and left him there and driven on. None the less, he earnestly desired to be spiritually-minded and a devout believer, feeling, in particular, an inclination towards mysticism, though unable to profess himself a mystic. 'I have,' he wrote to a friend, 'the sense of these things, but not the things themselves.' It seemed to him that he might find 'the things themselves' at Lausanne, if he went there in the proper spirit and sat at Vinet's feet.
His Swiss friend, Juste Olivier, a professor who was also a poet, procured him an engagement to deliver a course of lectures at the Lausanne Academy,[8] and he embarked upon his errand with as much humility as was compatible with professorship. Left free to choose his own subject, he decided to treat of Port Royal and the Jansenists—the most spiritually-minded of the Catholics, and those who had the closest affinity with the Protestants. By means of his lectures he thought to build himself a bridge by which to pass from the one camp to the other.
His elocution was defective, and his lectures were not quite such a success as he could have wished. The students used to meet in the cafés to parody them in the evenings. On the other hand, however, serious people eagerly watched the developments of the spiritual drama. Not only did it seem to them that the fate of a soul was in the balance—they were also hoping to see Protestantism score the sort of triumph that would make a noise in Paris. So they asked daily for news of Sainte-Beuve, as of a sick man lying at death's door, and asked Vinet, whom they regarded as his spiritual physician, to issue a bulletin. And Vinet's bulletin was to this effect: 'I think he is convinced, but not yet converted.' But Vinet, as he was soon to discover, was only partly right.