Thus may be given in brief the sum of the first part of M. de Carné s book; and this first part foretells what is to follow. The position of royalty, the nobles, and the commons respectively, was during four centuries developed only on bases furnished by the middle ages. The development effected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries M. de Carné has personified in Suger, abbot of St. Denis, and St. Louis—an able and intelligent choice. Suger and St. Louis were two rare statesmen in an epoch when statesmanship hardly existed. Suger, formed by the rigid and wise discipline of the church, a full-grown man in the midst of the childish caprices and inconsequences of his age, a real statesman, although the minister of a king who was no statesman at all, was certainly one of the greatest and most intelligent agents in the national work, of which those even who were its instruments rarely had the slightest conception. St. Louis rose still further above his age. He pertained not more to the middle ages by his faith than by his statesmanship he pertains to our own times. No king ever labored harder to evolve from its feudal envelope the civil and political life of France; no king ever studied more diligently to place royalty on the footing of modern sovereignties, and to fashion it, as M. de Carné well observes, after the Biblical royalty, rather than after feudal suzerainty.
M. de Carné is very right, then, in seeking in these two rare men a serious and matured political plan; but he would have found it difficult to discover traces of such a plan in others, and perhaps even the habits of his own mind render him less fitted to judge other heroes of the middle ages. In the very pages he has written, I see, indeed, Suger; I see, indeed St. Louis; but I do not see enough of the middle age itself, of that age of youth with its contradictions and it's inconsistencies; and M. de Carné it seems to me to be too wise, too sensible, too logical, and too much of a modern statesman, to paint it in its true light.
I express here, I confess, a personal impression, not a judgment, and perhaps a profounder study of the monuments of the middle ages would give me a different impression. But I own that when I seek the the middle ages in modern writings, I receive an impression quite different from that which I receive when I attempt to study them in their own monuments. With the moderns, not only with M. de Carné, but with writers who are antiquaries rather than statesman, I find presented as characteristic of the middle ages profound political use, or at least a certain power of foresight and calculation in those who govern; but if I open the smallest chronicle, I discover nothing of the sort. These kings and these statesmen become only warriors, rude captains, capable of any devotion—capable also of any violence and even of any falsehood, rather than of any wise or consistent policy seriously and steadily pursued. Whether it is merely the result of the oldness of the language, and the simplicity, so often apparent, which a still unformed idiom gives to thought, I [{201}] must say this age has on me the effect of an age of infancy.
It's tongue stammers, and its diction resembles the patois of our provinces and the songs of our nurses. In art it had, not without a simplicity sometimes admirable, that awkwardness and that stiffness which mark the first toddling walk of children. Its public life was mingled with puerile ceremonies, with a fantastic symbolism, sometimes even indecent. Its faith asked for no reason, as asks the mature man; but felt, saw, understood as does the adolescent; it carried into it sometimes a puerile superstition which impaired it, sometimes an admirable simplicity which excludes the wisdom of the doctors, though not the devotedness of martyrs. It instituted the Feast of Fools and of Asses. Yet it made the Crusades. It embraced Christian morality without hesitation and without an objection; it embraced it, forgot to practise it; while professing good, it practised evil with the facility of contradiction surpassing even the ordinary powers of human nature; it was a good Catholic, but scrupled not to pillage the churches. Its submission it refused in principle to nobody—to the pope, the king, or the suzerain; and yet never did the papacy receive more frequent insults, never had royalty such trouble to make itself obeyed, never were quarrels between superior and inferior so frequent, as in the middle ages—those ages of submission and of insubordination, in which the rules of the hierarchy were better established and less observed than in any other. This contradiction, this inconsistency, this easy acceptance of the law while it is asserted only in theory, and this easy forgetfulness of it when it comes to practice, this subordination of the mind, and this revolt of the heart, is it not plainly that of boyhood? Boy seldom refuses to accept the moral truth that is taught him; he does not reject in theory even the obedience which is exacted of him; but, at a given moment, it costs him nothing to contradict that truth in practice, and to fail in that obedience; he denies never the law; he unceasingly breaks it.
It is true, that when we rise to a certain general point of view, nothing appears better regulated than the mediaeval society. Regularity, far from being defective, was in excess. A manifold foresight multiplied the laws. The church and the state, feudality and the commons, sovereignty and suzerainty, had each their codes, complicated and provident as those of a society in which right and interest are complicated and run athwart each other. Decretals, bulls, decisions of councils, feudal assizes, royal charters and commercial charters, laws and regulations of all kinds, embarrass us by their number much more than they sadden us by their absence. And the definitive result of the whole is a grand and admirable effort of Christian wisdom to establish in this world the reign of justice and peace. No right is denied, no interest is sacrificed, no power is without its limit, no liberty without its defense. Relations of the king to the subject, of the suzerain to the vassal, of the master to the serf, all are regulated there on the basis, so often forgotten, of reciprocal rights and duties. Never, perhaps, have the conciliation of order and liberty, hierarchy and the equality, the powers of the chief and the rights of the inferior, been conceived in so happy a manner.
I said conceived, not effected; for if we come to the fact, the rule fails to be translated into reality, or, rather, is so often broken that it may be said not even to exist; all relations become violent; master and serf, suzerain and vassal, king and subject, whose mutual relations were so well settled in law, are in a continual struggle against one another. That magnificent edifice presented us in theory, with the pope and the emperor at its summit, and in which the lowest serf holds his place, is in reality as unsubstantial as the fairy castles seen in our dreams.
When I speak thus of the middle ages, I speak only of the lay society; I do not speak of the cloister and the church. They judge very improperly the middle ages who identify society in them with the church. The church was then, as now, not of her age. She struggled against it, and was more or less sullied on the points on which she came more directly in contact with the world—that is, in the secular clergy, and even the episcopacy, and more completely herself only when the cloister, the distance of places, and the diversity of origin removed her farthest from the feudal society—that is to say, in the religious orders and the papacy. I regard as a veritable chimera that dream, sometimes entertained, of a Europe gentle and submissive, obedient to the least word of the papacy, and conducted peaceably by the staff of St. Peter—in the ways of ignorance and barbarism, say unbelieving historians—in the ways of happiness and salvation, say Catholic writers. Both delight in this dream; the former because they would ruin the church by throwing upon her the responsibility of the crimes and vices of the middle ages; the latter because they would restore those ages by identifying them with the church. But I ask them to tell me at what time, during what year, what day, or what hour only this general submission existed? I ask them to tell me if there was a single day, a single minute which did not bring to the church her combat, not merely against kings and feudal lords, but against nations, and not only on one point of Europe, but on a thousand?—if once only this temporal jurisdiction of the papacy over the world was exercised otherwise than at the point of the sword—the sword of steel, as well as the sword of speech?
This middle age, this docile child, this innocent lamb, which allows itself to be led gently and blindly by the shepherd's crook, I find nowhere; I see indeed a child, but a hard and rebellious child, who seldom bends, rarely except to threats, and who, however humbly he may and, finds it no fault to straighten himself immediately after. Alas! the infancy of a people is not the infancy of men. The infant man has his physical weakness, which permits him to be controlled, and in restraining protects him. The infant people, for its misfortune, has all the passions and all the material forces of the full-grown man, and by the side of this formidable infant, the papacy to me appears different in everything, different by its supernatural life, which lifts it above the human condition, by the maturity of its intelligence, which elevates it above this youthful world, by the traditions of the Italian civilization which raises it above this world, still sunk in barbarism. It is divine in the midst of men, adult in the midst of children, Italian in the midst of these Teutons, Roman in the midst of these barbarians, civilian in the midst of these soldiers.
And by this, it seems to me, is justified, even if not otherwise, the political part played by the papacy in the middle ages. When it is demanded by what right it pretended to the temporal government of Europe, I answer unhesitatingly, by