“Has it?” said I; “that information is new to me—one lives to learn.” And here, as the pony stopped at the porch, I descended to offer my arm to the amiable charioteer.
Nothing worth recording took place the rest of the evening. Henry and the Painter played at billiards, Lady Gertrude and the Librarian at backgammon. Clara went into the billiard-room, seating herself there with her work: by some fond instinct of her loving nature she felt as if she ought not to waste the minutes yet vouchsafed to her—she was still with him who was all in all to her!
I took down ‘The Faithful Shepherdess,’ wishing to refresh my memory of passages which the scenes we had visited that day vaguely recalled to my mind. Looking over my shoulder, Percival guided me to the lines I was hunting after. This led to comparisons between ‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ and the ‘Comus,’ and thence to that startling contrast in the way of viewing, and in the mode of describing, rural nature, between the earlier English poets and those whom Dryden formed upon Gallic models, and so on into the pleasant clueless labyrinth of metaphysical criticism on the art of poetic genius. When we had parted for the night, and I regained my own room, I opened my window and looked forth on the moonlit gardens. A few minutes later, a shadow, moving slow, passed over the silvered ground, and, descending the terrace stairs, vanished among the breathless shrubs and slumbering flowers. I recognised the man who loved to make night his companion.
(To be continued.)
HENRI LACORDAIRE.[[3]]
There are few of the leaders or servants of the public who interest the general mind so profoundly as the great preachers, whose fame reaches the humblest as well as the most exalted, and within the reach of whose influence, more or less, an entire generation passes. Not to reckon the secondary class of preachers, whose biography is as inevitable as their decease, and whose lives are studied as a matter of religious duty by vast sections of the population who lie in a kind of underground out of the reach of ordinary literature, it is enough to instance such a life as that of Chalmers, to prove how wide a hold upon the public interest is taken by a man with whom, for once in their lives, most people of his generation have come in momentary contact in the slight but often momentous relation of hearers to a speaker. Only a very limited number can or do hear a great speaker in any other kind, compared with those who think it indispensable to hear the notable preacher of their day; and multitudes who have the most visionary conception of their rulers and statesmen, and all other public notabilities, have a certain personal knowledge of the orator whose sphere is the pulpit, which makes them as eager to hear his life as if their own history were somehow involved in it. The life which we have now to unfold to our readers is, however, one with which in this country we are unfamiliar. It is a religious existence of a fashion unknown to us. A strange atmosphere breathes out of its acts and sentiments; its strength and its feebleness are alike novel to our experience; but under all these puzzling distinctions, the life itself is very remarkable—interwoven with the entire history of its country and period—and opens to us so strange yet so instructive a glimpse of a Christianity not less fervent, pure, and true, than anything in our Protestant records, but couched in terms so different from ours, and wearing an aspect so unlike, that the mingled resemblance and dissimilarity add a charm to its own merits. The life of Henri Lacordaire, priest, preacher, and monk, told by his eloquent countryman and loving friend, M. de Montalembert, is for us not only a religious biography, but a novel study of character and life. The picture is fascinating but strange. Stranger than the eremites in the ancient wilderness, or those early followers of Benedict and Francis, with whom the same hand has lately made us familiar, is the apparition of the monk of the nineteenth century as he appears in these pages. For it is no picturesque lay figure which rises in the white Dominican tunic before our unaccustomed eyes, but a modern Frenchman, acute, brilliant, unimpassioned—full of sound sense and inexorable logic—a politician, a liberal, a man of his day, no less than a great preacher and a pious Catholic. The story of his life is without private events, for he was a priest, and debarred from any private life save that which makes a passion of friendship and finds an outlet there; but his career is that of a man strong in personal identity, who acts and thinks for himself, and throws his entire being into his occupation, whatever that may be. M. de Montalembert, always eloquent, is perhaps too rhetorical and declamatory for biography, at least in narrating a life which to a great extent he shared, and the vicissitudes of which, as he records them, naturally rouse his enthusiasm, his indignation, and grief, and tempt him into many digressions. The volume which he has dedicated to the memory of his friend is more of an eloge than a biography, and the lines of the picture are vague in consequence, and want the distinctness of portrait-painting; nevertheless the figure rounds out of its dim background into unquestionable individuality, and the English reader who has not already heard of the great French preacher will herein meet with another man well worthy the remembrance of the world.
Henri Lacordaire was born in the beginning of the present century, almost a contemporary of our own great preacher Edward Irving, in whose life one remarkable point of resemblance shows only the full force of the contrast between the French priest and the Scotch pastor. He was of moderate origin, undistinguished either in his birth or training, without any brilliant prognostics to mark the beginning of his career. It is thus that his biographer sums up the simple story of his early days:—
“Nothing could be more simple or ordinary than the life of this young priest. Those who seek romances or stormy passages in the lives of historical personages, or at least in their youth, must find them elsewhere. No adventure, no stroke of fate or of passion, troubled the course of his early years. The son of a village doctor, educated by a pious mother, he had, like almost all the young men of the time, lost his faith at college, and did not regain it either in the school of law or at the bar, where he ranked for two years among the advocates. In appearance nothing distinguished him from his contemporaries. He was a Deist, like all the youth of the time; he was, above all, liberal, like all France, but without excess. He shared the convictions and the generous delusions which we all breathed in the air which had been purified by the downfall of imperial despotism, but he desired only a liberty strong and legitimate; and without having yet been enlightened by the lights of faith, he already foresaw the supreme danger of modern society, for at twenty he wrote ‘Impiety leads to depravity,’ ‘Corrupt morals produce corrupt laws,’ and ‘Licence carries the nations on to slavery.’ He himself remained always virtuous and regular in his morals, without any other passion than for glory. Even before he became a Christian he respected himself.”
Life, however, soon quickened into warmer bloom, in the heart of this virtuous young heathen. Providence had other occupation for him than the practice of the French bar, and the excitement of those politics which present such a fantastic succession of revolution and stagnation, violence and apathy. He woke up out of his classic convictions into Christian life, and with characteristic promptitude, as soon as he believed, devoted himself to the service of religion. “Neither man nor book was the instrument of his conversion,” says his biographer. “A sudden and secret touch of grace opened his eyes to the nothingness of irreligion. In one day he became a Christian, and the next, being a Christian, determined to become a priest.” This prompt and clear spirit, swiftly logical, unimpassioned, and master of itself, pervaded his entire life. It was not argument or exhortation that convinced him. He perceived in his rapid young soul—aware as he was of forces in himself which must have work to occupy them, and of unspeakable want in the world around him—“the nothingness of irreligion”—a notable and significant discovery. That elegant, classic, unproductive blank of Pagan virtue—could anything ever come of it, even in its highest development? Swiftly the alternative presented itself to the young Frenchman. Out of this “nothingness” he did not come by halves. From the first freedom of his young manhood and accomplished education, he went back again steadily to the rules and studies of a new training. After three years at the seminary of St Sulpice he became a priest, at a time when priests had little honour and no popularity in France. The young advocate, glowing with all the inspirations of undeveloped eloquence—a man destined to play so notable a part in his generation, and no doubt aware in his heart of the genius which nobody else as yet suspected—fell, in the flush of his youth, into obscure priestly offices, such as doubtless demonstrated to him a “something” in the Christian faith enough to exercise and employ all the helpful energies of man. He became the almoner of a convent, then of a college, following the common order of the youthful priesthood. Except the fact that he had thus suddenly, by prompt exercise of will, joined himself to that unpopular class, nothing as yet appeared to distinguish him from his brethren. “The only thing singular in him was his liberalism,” says M. de Montalembert. “By a phenomenon then unheard of, this convert, this seminarist, this almoner of nuns, was steadfast in remaining a liberal, as in the days when he was only a student and advocate.” This was, to bystanders, the one remarkable feature in him—he was a priest, and yet he was a liberal—to wit, a radical, a democrat, all but a republican. From his convent he wrote like any other enthusiastic young man, in the days when men found a gospel in political privileges, of “the imprescriptible rights of the human race.” His dream was to place these imprescriptible rights under the protection of the Church—to ally the old religion with the new freedom. “Christianity is not a law of slavery,” he wrote, in youthful boldness, from his “little convent of the Visitandines,” when Paris surged with the subterranean heavings of the Revolution of July. “She has not forgot that her children were free when all the world groaned under the iron of so many horrible Cæsars; and that they created, underground, a society of men who spoke of humanity under the palace of Nero.” “In his youth and his solitude,” he who had forsaken the bar and its triumphs, the world and its ways, for the humble offices of the priesthood, arrived at this conclusion which nobody else had dreamed of. It is a conclusion which, since then, has been tried on a sufficiently large scale and found impracticable, but it is not the less an idea which must have been full of charms and of inspiration to the young priest, whom a higher call than that of political right or wrong had drawn within the bosom of an institution supposed, and with justice, to be the foe of liberty.
Across this calm and soft perspective—from which the young priest, palpitating with all the impulses of youth and genius, looked forth with hopes that seem Utopian, and warm ideal conceptions of good and glory yet to be attained—a light more brilliant suddenly streams. This path of life, as yet so humble, enveloped in profound personal obscurity, unknown to man, is suddenly crossed by a dazzling meteoric radiance, and thrown into strong illumination before the world. It is the Abbé de Lamennais, strange Quixote of French religious history, who suddenly appears upon the scene, without introduction or description, with a suddenness somewhat confusing to an English reader, who is less instructed in the notable facts and persons of Gallican ecclesiastical history in recent years, than the audience which M. de Montalembert especially addresses. The point of junction between the distinguished ecclesiastic of La Chenaie and the young almoner of the Visitandines, is this same belief common to both, that the Church, so far from being the enemy, ought to be the chief supporter of political freedom. M. de Lamennais, “then the most celebrated and the most venerated of French priests,” had started from the opposite ground of high ultramontane Papalism, but, by dint of the lofty view taken by a lofty and visionary though wilful and uncertain mind, of that unique spiritual despotism, had come to the conclusion—a conclusion falsified by all experience, but not inconceivable in theory—that the Holy Father of Christendom ought to be the guardian of all men’s liberties. It was 1830, a year of Revolution,—another violent crisis had come in the fortunes of France. The freedom, the boldness, the bewilderment of such a sudden change of affairs, excited and stirred up all questions and spirits. This new theory of the small but enthusiastic religious band, which aimed at nothing less than re-conquering for the Church the love and heart of the country, came into the field with many others. It is at this point that M. de Montalembert, who for some little time has been preluding tenderly in strains of love and lamentation, suddenly dashes into his story, and introduces us, with an affectionate abruptness, into this agitated society, to the beginning of his friendship with Lacordaire, and to the person and character of his friend.