Is it not a remarkable coincidence that Lamennais, too, should end by finding a stumbling-block in the word which had determined the intellectual development of the whole generation? Victor Hugo in his endeavour to vindicate the principle of authority in matters of taste at last feels himself obliged to criticise and enlarge the idea of order; Lamennais in his battle for Catholicism is compelled to do the same. With what passionate grief does he describe in his letters the corruption which he finds prevailing amongst the props and pillars of order in Rome!
"Catholicism was my life, because it is the life of humanity; my desire was to defend it, and to rescue it from the abyss into which it is sinking deeper every day. Nothing would have been easier. It did not suit the bishops that I should do it. There remained Rome. To Rome I went, and there I saw the most shameful sewer that has ever defiled the sight of man. The gigantic cloaca of the Tarquinii would be too strait for so much filth. No god but self-interest reigns there; they would sell nations, sell the human race, sell the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, for a piece of ground and a few piastres."
"Such was the appearance at close quarters of the power whose most dauntless knight Lamennais had been. Was it any wonder that he turned round! Was it any wonder that he, like the priests of the ancient Saxons to whom Renan has compared him, cut down with a well-directed blow of his axe the divinity to whose altar he had summoned the reluctant world!"
But even more remarkable than this clearsightedness in a single matter are the gleams of profounder general insight which we now find in Lamennais' letters. Hitherto he had sought absolute truth, and had looked to authority to ensure this. Now he suddenly arrives at the idea of relativity, the idea which most thoroughly and utterly demolishes the principle of authority.
"The older I grow the more it astonishes me to see how all the beliefs which are deepest rooted in us depend upon the age in which we live, the society into which we have been born, and a thousand other equally accidental circumstances. Only think what our beliefs would be if we had come into the world ten centuries earlier, or had been born in this century at Teheran, at Benares, or on the Island of Otaheite!"
There is more philosophy in these two sentences, which forestall Taine's theory of the influence of surroundings, than in all the volumes of Lamennais' famous chief work.[5]
The following verses date from his earliest youth:
On a souvent vu des maris,
Jaloux d'une épouse légère;
On en a vu même à Paris,
Mais ce n'est pas le tien, ma chère.