It is not difficult to recognise in this second great decision of his life the same prompt and steadfast spirit which, having convinced the young advocate of the nothingness of irreligion, bore him at once, without pause or lingering, into the service of that faith in which there was something, a power owned by all human hearts. It is the same principle which again moves him. Common means and modes of working this power have been sadly unsuccessful of recent years. What is this grand, unused, obsolete instrument, the traces of which are marked all over that Roman soil among the vines and the ruins? Who can tell if perhaps that, restored to efficient working, and new-tempered and polished, might accomplish, as of old, those prodigies of labour and service, for which the usual tools seem no longer practicable? As soon as he settles in his mind the undoubted duty of trying this forgotten weapon, and restoring it to the armoury of the Church, no further pause is necessary. In the height of his fame and strength, the great preacher returns upon the new preparations and training necessary for his new life. He disappears into “the depths of an Italian cloister” for his novitiate, assured that he is thus doing his highest duty to God and his country. “I believe that this act is the dénouement of my life—the result of all that God has done before—the secret of His graces, of my trials and experiences,” he writes. “I am like a man who has gained some credit, and who can apply it to some useful and generous work. Without the past I could do nothing; by continuing only the past, it would be a life of which the effect was not proportioned to the grace which God has given me.” This was the strange result of his retirement and pondering. In Notre Dame, amid the throng of impressed and admiring hearers, the preacher felt that he was not doing enough, nor making sufficient use of God’s gifts. A noble discontent had seized him—he had to make better usury yet, and greater, of his talent. To see him, after all his questioning, disappear into that Italian cloister, is to us the strangest anticlimax—the most wonderful apparent contradiction; but it was the calm conclusion of his mind—a mind ripe and well able to judge, unimpassioned and sensible. We do not attempt to offer any explanation of the act, nor do we profess ourselves competent to understand the convictions that led to it; but strange as it is, here is the fact, let us draw what conclusions we will. According to Lacordaire’s deliberate and thoughtful decision, he could serve God best as a monk, and a monk accordingly he became.
Five years afterwards he reappeared in the pulpit of Notre Dame, “with his shaven head and his white tunic.” He preached with his usual eloquence upon La Vocation de la Nation Française, and spoke only in passing of his own monastic vocation. He made but one appearance, contenting himself apparently with “inaugurating in France,” as M. de Montalembert says, “the monastic frock, which she had not seen for fifty years.” He disappeared from Paris after this for two years more, dividing his time between the Italian cloister and the southern provinces of France, until in 1843 a new war began to rage in the French world, on that old question of liberty of teaching, for which the young ‘L’Avenir,’ years ago, had fought so stoutly, and for which its editors had made their appearance at the bar of the Chamber of Peers. Under the influence of this strife, and just as the Government awoke to alarm, and began to regard with apprehension the appearance of the Dominican frock in the pulpit and in the streets, the new Archbishop invited Lacordaire to resume his lectureship in Notre Dame. The Frère Prêcheur took his place again in the metropolitan pulpit: it was at once a defiance of the alarmed Government, and a re-proclamation of those principles of religious liberty on which the preacher had long ago taken his stand. For this question “de la liberté d’enseignement” involved also the question of liberty of association, the power of forming communities—a power nominally accorded to the French nation by its charter, but which had never been actually granted to it. The Church, wise as a serpent, seized upon this public right. She, too, had bethought herself of the long disused and valuable instrument of monasticism. Without monks no thorough hold could be got upon popular educational institutions; but without the power of forming corporations and organising bodies of men, the invasion of a new race of monks was impossible. On the other hand, alarmed statesmen and the public in general foresaw, with this power in the hands of the Church, an immediate inroad of the dreaded Jesuit and his brethren, to lay insidious hold upon the education of the people. “While the bishops and Catholic publicists,” says M. de Montalembert, “claimed the liberty promised by the charter with all its consequences, the numerous orators and writers of the University party defended its monopoly, and made use especially against the Jesuits of that unpopularity which the heirs of the perverse doctrines and cruel persecutions of the eighteenth century could everywhere re-awaken against the religious orders. We owe them nothing but expulsion! this cry of a deputy too famous for his interruptions, seemed to the world of so-called liberals the best response to the claims raised for religious associations in the name of liberty and equality.” The Church mustered her forces gallantly, and went into the conflict with might and main. With cunning boldness she placed two of the feared and suspected monks in the pulpit of Notre Dame—Lacordaire, in his white Dominican robe, and the Jesuit De Ravignan—to fire between them the new-born enthusiasm of French Catholics, and show what voices were these which the timidity of the State and the prejudices of the vulgar would banish from France. Into that pulpit politics did not enter—but an instrument more efficacious was there. “Lacordaire did not himself enter into the controversy,” says M. de Montalembert, “and not the least allusion to it is to be found in all his discourses.... But the universal popularity of his preaching, the immense audiences which everywhere collected around the pulpit in which he appeared, were arguments much more eloquent than discussions of politics or public law. It sufficed him to establish his victory by preaching in Paris and throughout France, and by assuming the right of living in a community, and attiring himself as he pleased, which no one dared to contest with him, in the different places where he lived with his brethren.” Such was the unquestionably potent line of argument set up by the Gallican Church. Here was the greatest preacher of the age, a man pure and pious, incapable of self-aggrandisement, full of ardour for God’s service, known to have hazarded his life in hospital and public pestilence, a champion of popular liberty, altogether of spotless reputation and well-deserved fame; was the order to which such a man belonged, by free will and choice, to be feared and banished? were such as he to be interrupted in their great work because they preferred to wear a certain garb and conform to certain rules? No, in the name of liberty! A more effective plea could scarcely be imagined. Lacordaire’s colleague, the Père de Ravignan, claimed for himself, as M. de Montalembert tells us, “as a citizen, and in the name of the charter, and of the liberty of conscience guaranteed to all, the right of being and of calling himself a Jesuit.” But the Frère Prêcheur does not seem to have done even so much as this. Never abandoning the idea for which others were now fighting as he had once fought, he devoted himself to his duties in the midst of the strife—made his monkish frock splendid with the eloquence of a voice worthy the old renown of the French pulpit—made it familiar to all eyes as he travelled through the country collecting crowds of eager hearers everywhere; finally, with quiet resolution, established here and there, in different quarters, houses of his order, assuming for himself, in the strength of his character and fame, the very right for which his colleagues were struggling, and giving calm intimation, as he did so, that he would defend this right, if attacked, before the tribunals of his country. Nobody ventured to attack Lacordaire. The white Dominican went all over France, leaving behind him here and there a little nucleus of monks. Public opinion melted before the great preacher. If men’s minds did not change, at least their opposition was hushed and put down by the unquestionable eminence of the man. “Henceforward,” he himself says, “in all the pulpits, and upon all the roads of France, the monastic robe has recovered the right of citizenship which it lost in 1790.” He restored the credit of the monks, and gained a certain degree of toleration for the Jesuits themselves, and thus won what is in the eyes of M. de Montalembert “the great victory which shall immortalise his name.”
This struggle, which Lacordaire himself calls “the most perilous and the most decisive of all his campaigns,” was brought to a conclusion by the renewed political agitations of 1848. In that strange hubbub and overthrow of existing affairs, the tide of public commotion, by way of demonstrating the hold he had obtained on the public mind, drew the monk from his retirement to plunge him into the newly-formed Assembly of France. His appearance there did not, in the excitement of the time, shock the sensibilities of any; his election even “charmed and reassured all religious men;” and the preacher himself was sufficiently sanguine to believe that the mild Lamartine sway was to maintain the constitution of France, and that great charter for which he had fought so long, and to introduce a new era in the history of the nation. He obeyed the voice of the people, like other great Elects, and took his seat always in his Dominican frock in the revolutionary parliament—and he assisted in founding another paper, ‘L’Ere Nouvelle,’ which was neither so long-lived nor so brilliant as ‘L’Avenir’ of his youth. But the natural good sense of the man shortly interposed. His parliamentary career lasted but ten days, and erelong he retired also from the newspaper, and withdrew to one of his new convents to recover himself and throw off the excitement of this renewed essay at politics. Then having shaken himself free of this interruption, he went back to his beloved pulpit, where he preached and laboured as before for three years. But in April 1851, when concluding his lectures, he took an unlooked-for and unintended farewell—some subtle shadow of coming events, which, however, he denies to be a presentiment, having moved him to special tenderness and pathos—of the pulpit in which, more or less, he had laboured for twenty years. “Oh, walls of Notre Dame! sacred arches which have borne my words to so many intelligences deprived of God! altars which have blessed me! I will never separate from you!” he cries, his heart moving within him as he recalls his past life, and all that has happened there, since, young and in the dawn of his fame, he made his first appearance in the metropolitan church. But he never again entered the pulpit thus endeared by the labours of a life; once more only he preached in Paris, and once again, in 1854, delivered, at the request of the Archbishop, six discourses in Toulouse. His career as a preacher had come to an abrupt and unexpected conclusion: for in the mean time that virtuous republic, which Lamartine and his brethren had begun so mildly, had fallen into desperate troubles, and the sharp and sudden stroke of the coup d’état had shocked society in France into a new mood. Freedom of speech, eloquence itself, went suddenly out of fashion. Silence was best when there was so little to say that could be anyhow consolatory to the people or satisfactory to the ruler. With a delicate but indignant reticence, M. de Montalembert indicates thus the reason of his friend’s sudden withdrawal from the pulpit:—
“I do not think that any formal interdiction emanating even from the temporal authorities had ever been pronounced against him; but there was a general sentiment that this bold and free language which he had used for twenty years, under all changes, without meeting any obstacle, without recognising any curb but that of orthodoxy, was now out of date. Evil days had come for the struggles and the triumphs of eloquence. It was universally repudiated, and made responsible for all the misfortunes of the country, for all the dangers of society, by a triumphant revenge of those who had never been able to make any man listen to them. The prince of sacred eloquence had thus to be silent. He said afterwards, ‘I left the pulpit in a spontaneous fear of my liberty before an age which was no longer free. I perceive,’ he added, ‘that in my thoughts, in my language, in my past, in what remains to me of future, I also was a kind of freedom, and that my hour had come to disappear like the others.’”
He preached no more. He was not yet fifty—still in the full vigour of his powers—but the day of discussion, of agitation, of eloquence was over, and Lacordaire, with instinctive wisdom, seems to have perceived the expediency of submission. It is a strange conclusion to a singular career. After the chivalrous pugnacity of his earlier years; after his steady struggle all his life through, by every possible means to link together democracy and Catholicism, the old unmoving Church and the new ever-varying world; after ‘L’Avenir’ of his youth, with its daring hopes and efforts—the brilliant youthful future which he and his colleagues were to work out of revolution and anarchy—and ‘L’Ere Nouvelle’ of his later years, which had less of the future, less of hope, yet was still a new beginning;—it is a strange sight to see the champion suddenly drop his arms and stand silent, arrested for ever before this new, strange, silent figure of absolutism which has suddenly erected itself against the agitated firmament. When this unlooked-for apparition rises between him and the skies, the great preacher has nothing more to say. All is over in a moment. “I have never feared but one thing—the absolute triumph of an individual,” said his friend, Madame Swetchine. And when, at last, after a world of controversy and discussion, that dreaded event arrived, the public life of the great orator came to an almost instantaneous conclusion. He retired not by compulsion, but by some internal sense of necessity. “He had no violence, no persecution to complain of,” says his biographer, “and I only render homage to truth by declaring that I have never seen in him the least trace of bitterness or of animosity against the new power. This power inspired him only with the sentiment of neutrality, dignified and a little disdainful, which existed in his nature in respect to all powers.” But whatever his sentiment might be, the fact is certain. Before all other developments of power the orator had held up bravely the banner of the Church, and kept his place. Before this new potency he gave way and yielded. It is one of the strangest acts of homage ever done to an unquestionable strength—“Le prince de la parole sacrée dût donc se taire.” He gave up that right over which he had rejoiced in the fervent days of his youth as “something inalienable, divine, eternally free”—the right of speaking of God. He made neither resistance nor public protest. The shadow of the new Empire fell over him in sudden chill and silence, and the words died upon his fervid lips. He who had spoken so freely, laboured so hard, spent himself so liberally for the service of his Church and country, was in himself, as he expresses it, “a kind of liberty”—a personified freedom; and, as with other freedoms, the day was over for him. He saw by intuition that resistance was useless. The silent despot overawed, as by a species of fascination, the eloquent priest, who, in his heart, was “a little disdainful” of all kinds of powers. This new kind of power, personal, self-concentrated, standing alone in an inexorable mute mystery over the destinies of France, silenced the preacher as if by force of instinct. His voice died out of the country, which had fallen into a sudden paralysis, half of fear, half of admiration, before this basilisk Emperor. The spell was upon Lacordaire as upon France. He never opened his lips again in public after that one series of provincial lectures, which were themselves broken off and left imperfect, because one of them contained “some outbursts of truth, of grief, and of boldness, which were no longer in season. He had to renounce public speaking definitively,” says M. de Montalembert, with significant reserve; and here, according with the beginning of the imperial power, ended his public life.
He withdrew after this to Soraye, an ancient abbey, first of the Benedictines, then of the Dominicans, to which order he himself belonged, and where there now flourished a large public school. He devoted himself to the regeneration and perfection of this institution, to “the teaching of youth, which had always been the supreme vocation of his life.” Here he consoled the sadness and disappointment of his heart, wounded as it was by the sudden overthrow of all the work of his life, and by the sad and rapid change of affairs which had taken place in France, among the children whom he loved. But though he made no public complaint, and manfully devoted himself to the favourite occupation which Providence had still left to him, the lamentable downfall of all his hopes went to the heart of the liberal monk. His country, his age, “which scarcely knew how to obey,” had become all at once eager “not only to accept but to implore a master.” His Church and religious party, “clergy and Catholics, who had so long applauded the masculine independence of his eloquence, had fallen all at once a prey to a delusion without excuse, and to a prostration without example in all the history of the Church. Names which had been honoured to appear beside his own in the memorable manifestoes by which Christian liberty had invoked the sole shelter of public freedom, appeared all at once affixed to harangues and mandiments which borrowed the forms of Byzantine adulation to salute the mad dream of an orthodox absolutism.” “Till the last day of his life,” adds M. de Montalembert, “the grief and indignation with which the sight of this great moral catastrophe inspired him was not weakened. But his affliction, his magnanimous wrath, breathed forth in his letters. This treasure remains to us, thank God! it will be preserved for posterity; and when the time shall come when all may be said, it will appear as the most brilliant and most necessary of protests against those who have so miserably divided, disarmed, and discredited Catholicism in France.”
We have no space to quote, as the biographer does, those melancholy and indignant letters. Whilst thus breathing forth to his friends the disappointment which consumed his soul, Lacordaire lived on in his southern seminary, far from the busy world which had deceived him, a life of usefulness and silence. It was a “retreat laborious and animated” in which he now found himself; and, with a true Christian philosophy, the great orator bent all his faculties to his work. “One of the consolations of my present life,” he writes, with touching sadness, “is to live only with God and children: the latter have their faults, but they have still betrayed nothing and dishonoured nothing.” He made Soraye “the most flourishing and popular scholastic establishment in the south;” he formed a tender paternal friendship with many young souls, over whom he had immense influence. With the same eloquence which he had displayed in Notre Dame he preached to his pupils in their provincial chapel. In short, he accepted his position like a true man; and, hiding his mortification, his profound disappointment, his injured heart in his own breast, devoted himself to the important but obscure position in which he was to end his life. Here another great event happened to him in his seclusion. It was from Soraye he came, in his Dominican frock, to receive from the French Academy “the noblest recompense which can, in our days, crown a glorious and independent life.” He sat one day only in that illustrious assembly, where he appeared, as he himself said, as “the symbol of freedom accepted and fortified by religion.” This last honour was the last public event which occurred in his life. He went back laureated for his dying, and ended his life in Soraye, after a painful illness—so far as we are able to make out, for M. de Montalembert is indistinct in the matter of dates—in the winter of 1861. “It is the first time that my body has resisted my will,” he said, with a half-playful melancholy, in the midst of his sufferings; and died exclaiming, “My God, open to me, open to me!” with a sublime simplicity. God opened to him, and his agitations were over. Whether on the other side of that wonderful gateway he might discover that his monkish frock was less worth fighting for than it appeared, who can inquire? He lived a life full of worthy labour and service, and doubtless found his reward.
Our space does not permit us to follow M. de Montalembert, in his quotations from the letters and sermons of his friend, though there are in these letters many snatches of brilliant and tender eloquence on which we are much tempted to linger. It is not, however, in his productions that Lacordaire is most remarkable; it is in his character and career. “The principal thing is to have a life,” he himself said, when deprecating the over-production of modern literature; and no man has more exemplified the saying. He had a life, this man of conflict and strife, of self-denial and silence, of independence and duty—a life too human to make any formal anatomical consistency over-visible in its flesh-and-blood details—broadly contradictory, yet always in a harmony with itself more true than consistency. With his heart full of the agitations and the hopes of his time, he lived in his cloister in the practice of self-mortifications and punishments as severe as those with which any antique son of Dominic had subdued the flesh. “When all the events of this generous life shall be known, the orator will disappear before the monk,” says his sympathetic and admiring biographer, “and the prestige of that eloquence which has moved, enlightened, and converted so many souls, will seem a less marvel than the formidable austerity of his life, the severity with which he chastised his flesh, and his passionate love for Jesus Christ.” This is the side of his character and existence least comprehensible to the English spectator. How he, so unimpassioned, so temperate, so sensible—he who had only loved glory, and nothing else, before he loved God—should have needed “excessive macerations” to subdue that flesh which, so far as appears, was far from exercising any despotic sway over the spirit, is a curious question, and one which perhaps never can be answered to the satisfaction of our practical understandings; but the interest, the individuality, and sincere nobleness of his life seem unquestionable. From his little convent he passes to the bar and public tribunal, where even the unwilling crowd applauds; to the pulpit, where admiring multitudes surround him; yet returns to his Visitandines and his almonry, obedient and silent, when the hour of his triumph is over. From the height of popular fame and success, driven by that noble intuition in his heart that he is not sufficiently using the talent God has given him, he withdraws to take up the monk’s frock, most despised of habits, not to hide a mortified life or wounded heart, as a sentimental bystander might suppose, but for the sake of the labour and use of which he believes it still capable. Deeply contradictory as such a proceeding is of all our convictions and theories, it is far from our thoughts to blame Lacordaire for this singular vestment in which he enwrapped all his later life. It may be that to the eyes of this languid and over-refining age, the forcible type and symbol which antedate all arguments is, after all, the thing most wanted; and that the apparition of the monk, self-denuded of all possessions, even of his own will, for the glory of God and the service of his neighbour, may startle the confused intelligence into a belief of that work and its importance, which no philosophy could give. Such at least seems to have been the conviction of Lacordaire. Like his great contemporary Irving, the French preacher felt the inefficacy of common means for the work on which his heart was set. To both the world came open-mouthed, wondering and admiring; but neither in the London modern church, nor under the noble arches of Notre Dame, was the report of the prophet believed as he felt in his heart it ought to be. This uneasiness in the passionate heart of our great countryman gave rise, by some subtle magnetic influence, to a wild dream of miraculous aid and voices from heaven; and in the self-controlled and unimpassioned soul of the French priest it wrought an issue almost as strange—the restoration, to some extent, of monasticism in his country, and the dedication of his own life to that disused and discredited vocation. No two men could be more unlike, but here both met in a strange concord and agreement. Something had to be done beyond the ordinary routine of evangelism to seize upon the dull ear and sluggish heart of the time. Supernaturalism, or monasticism, or any other martyrdom—what matter, so it did but startle that slumbering generation to some thought of its evil ways? Let us build the sepulchres of those prophets whom our fathers, by their apathy and indifference, drove into such a noble desperation. We too, doubtless, will do our share of the same work. Yet it is a kind of penitence of humanity for its ever-recurring mistakes and misconceptions, which prompts one generation to decorate the tombs into which the sins of a former generation have urged and driven the not perfect yet noble dead.
LADY MORGAN’S MEMOIRS.[[4]]
In a small house furnished in the tawdry-brilliant style, in a small street adjoining Lowndes Square, there dwelt, between the years 1828 and 1859, a small woman, who, though very old, persisted in believing herself to be young, and dressed and spoke and acted as if she were the observed of all observers. She was not handsome; she never could have been, for there were defects both in face and form at variance with beauty; but she was bright, or rather brisk, in the expression of her countenance, and her air was jaunty, though neither graceful nor elegant. The career of this little woman had been a remarkably busy, and, on the whole, a successful one. She was a voluminous writer, and had made a good deal of money out of her publishers. By a process which is perhaps better understood on the other side of St George’s Channel than here, she succeeded in making her way into what is called “society,” and she never loosened her hold, having once made it fast, upon man or woman, whom, for any reason of rank, worth, or talent, she considered it worth while to cultivate. It is curious to observe likewise the skill with which she makes it appear that the balance of advantage in the matter of acquaintance was always on the side of her friends, especially when they happened to be gentlemen; for she laboured under the happy delusion of believing that she was not only the cleverest, but the most beautiful woman of the age, and that no man, young or old, married or single, ever approached except to fall in love with her.