We have seen how Bossuet stopped the soft confidence of a weak nun at the very first word. The little we have said of Fenelon's direction shows sufficiently how the dangerous director evaded the dangers.
Those eminently spiritual persons could keep up for years between heaven and earth this tender dialectic of the love of God. But is it the same in these days with men who have no wings, who crawl and cannot fly? Incapable of those ingenious turnings and windings by which passion went on sportively, and eluding itself, do they not run the risk of stumbling at the first step?
I know well that this absence of early education, and vulgarity or clownishness, may often put an insurmountable barrier between priests and well-bred women. Many things, however, that would not be tolerated in another man are reckoned in them as merits. Stiffness is austerity, and awkwardness is accounted the simplicity of a saint, who has ever lived in a desert. They are measured by a different and more indulgent rule than the laity. The priest takes advantage of everything that is calculated to make him be considered as a man apart, of his dress, his position, his mysterious church, that invests the most vulgar with a poetical gleam.
Who gave them this last advantage? Ourselves. We, who have reinstated, rebuilt, as one may say, those very churches they had disregarded. The priests were building up their Saint-Sulpices, and other heaps of stones, when the laity retrieved Nôtre-Dame and Saint Ouen. We pointed out to them the Christian spirit of these living stones,[[1]] but they did not see it; we taught it them, but they could not understand. And how long did the misconception last? Not less than forty years, ever since the appearance of the Génie de Christianisme. The priests would not believe us, when we explained to them this sublime edifice; they did not recognise it; but who can wonder? It belongs only to those who understood it.
At length, however, they have changed their opinion. They have found it to be political and clever to speak as we do, and extol Christian architecture. They have decked themselves out with their churches, again invested themselves with this glorious cloak, and assumed in them a triumphant posture. The crowd comes, looks, and admires. Truly, if we are to judge of a well-dressed man by his coat, he who is invested with the splendour of a Nôtre-Dame of Paris, or a Cologne cathedral, is apparently the giant of the spiritual world. Alexander, on his departure from India, wishing to deceive posterity as to the size of his Macedonians, had a camp traced out on the ground in which a space of ten feet was allotted to each of his soldiers. What an immense place is this church, and what an immense host must inhabit this wonderful dwelling! Optical delusion adds still more to the effect. Every proportion changes. The eye is deceived and deceives itself, at the same time, with these sublime lights and deepening shades, all calculated to increase the illusion. The man whom in the street you judged, by his surly look, to be a village schoolmaster, is here a prophet. He is transformed by this majestic framework; his heaviness becomes strength and majesty; his voice has formidable echoes. Women and children tremble and are afraid.
When a woman returns home, she finds everything prosy and paltry. Had she even Pierre Corneille for a husband, she would think him pitiful, if he lived in the dull house they still show us. Intellectual grandeur in a low apartment does not affect her. The comparison makes her sad, bitterly quiet. The husband puts up with it, and smiles, or pretends to do so; "Her director has turned her brain," says he aloud, and adds, aside, "After all, she only sees him at church." But what place, I ask, is more powerful over the imagination, richer in illusions, and more fascinating than the church? It is precisely the church that ennobles, raises, exaggerates, and sheds a poetical ray upon this otherwise vulgar man.
Do you see that solemn figure, adorned with all the gold and purple of his pontifical dress, ascending with the thought, the prayer of a multitude of ten thousand men, the triumphal steps in the choir of St. Denis? Do you see him still, above all that kneeling mass, hovering as high as the vaulted roofs, his head reaching the capitals, and lost among the winged heads of the angels, whence he hurls his thunder? Well, it is the same man, this terrible archangel himself, who presently descends for her, and now, mild and gentle, goes yonder into that dark chapel, to listen to her in the languid hours of the afternoon! Delightful hour of tumultuous, but tender sensations! (Why does the heart palpitate so strongly here?) How dark the church becomes! Yet it is not late. The great rose-window over the portal glitters with the setting sun. But it is quite another thing in the choir; dark shadows envelope it, and beyond is obscurity. One thing astounds and almost frightens us, however far we may be, which is the mysterious old painted glass at the farthest end of the church, on which the design is no longer distinguishable, twinkling in the shade, like an illegible magic scroll of unknown characters. The chapel is not less dark on that account; you can no longer discern the ornaments and delicate moulding entwined in the vaulted roof; the shadow deepening blends and confounds the outlines. But, as if this chapel were not yet dark enough, it contains, in a retired corner, a narrow recess of dark oak, where that man, all emotion, and that trembling woman, so close to each other, are whispering together about the love of God.
[[1]] See my History of France (1833), the last chapter of Vol. II., and particularly the last ten pages. In this same volume I have made a serious mistake which I wish to rectify. In speaking of ecclesiastical celibacy (temp. Gregory VII.), I have said that married men could never have raised those sublime monuments, the spire of Strasbourg, &c. I find, on the contrary, that the architects of the Gothic churches were laymen, and generally married. Erwin de Steinbach, who built Strasbourg, had a celebrated daughter, Sabina, who was herself an artist.