About this time he met Lamartine, became intimate with Victor Hugo, “then the poet of all sweet and virtuous things,” and numbered among his friends Sainte-Beuve, who then shared Montalembert's religious enthusiasm and his belief that Europe was to be regenerated by the church. Ireland, too, came in for a full share of his sympathy. He wrote an article on that country which Guizot allowed to go in entire. A friend tells him that his article on Sweden is dull, and that on Ireland commonplace. “Disappointing,” writes the young author in his diary, “but better than if my friend had praised me insincerely.” O'Connell, then in the fulness of his powers and his popularity, greatly attracted him. He would go all the way to Ireland to see him. And he did. Crossing the two channels, and traversing England, he made the journey over the mountains of Kerry on horseback, with a little Irish boy for his guide. He visited O'Connell at Derrynane, prepared and anxious to discuss with him the great subjects which filled his mind. The Liberator received him kindly, and after dinner—looking at the ingenuous face of twenty before him—did what he thought precisely the proper thing to do—ushered him at once into the drawing-room, where the young count was thrown on the tender mercies of a crowd of pretty and gay young Irish women. Encore une illusion perdue! He had crossed seas and mountains to discuss freedom, the church, English rule and Irish emancipation, with Ireland's greatest man, who, without listening to a word from him, thrust him into another room amid a bevy of laughing girls!
After Montalembert's return from Ireland came his intimacy with Lacordaire and Lamennais, and the joint literary enterprise of the three in the establishment of the Avenir, whose motto was “God and Liberty.” Its first number was issued Oct. 15, 1830. We will not dwell on its history, so familiar to all Catholics, except to refer to the holy war waged by it and its friends against the monopoly of education by the government. Under the law, every private school, every educational institution not licensed and regulated by the University of Paris, was absolutely forbidden. Utter irreligiousness then pervaded the colleges and schools of France. The generation which passed through those schools bears witness to their evil influences, and confirms Lacordaire's own record, who says that he left college “with religion destroyed in his soul,” and that he, like almost all the youths of his period, “lost his faith at school.”
Montalembert's picture of these [pg 438] evil influences was everywhere recognized as truthful. “Is there a single establishment of the university where a Christian child can live in the exercise of faith? Does not a contagious doubt, a cold and tenacious impiety, reign over all these young souls whom she pretends to instruct? Are they not too often either polluted, or petrified, or frozen? Is not the most flagrant, the most monstrous, the most unnatural immorality inscribed in the records of every college, and in the recollections of every child who has passed as much as eight days there?”
To test the law forbidding freedom in education, Lacordaire and Montalembert opened a free school for poor children at Paris in the Rue des Arts. They were indicted for the offence, and tried at the bar of the Chamber of Peers. The audience, as may well be imagined, was made up from the nobility and intelligence of the land. The prisoners defended their cause in person. Lacordaire, who spoke first, referred to the fact that the government had lately impeached the previous ministers by virtue of power in the charter not reduced to a special law. “If they could do it, so could I,” said the brave priest, “with this difference, that they asked blood, while I desired to give a free education to the children of the poor.” He ended by recalling to his judges the example of Socrates “in the first struggle for freedom to preach.” “In that cause célèbre by which Socrates fell,” said Lacordaire, “he was evidently culpable against the gods, and in consequence against the laws of his country. Nevertheless, posterity, both pagan and Christian, has stigmatized his judges and accusers; and of all concerned have absolved only the culprit and the executioner—the culprit, because he had failed to keep the laws of Athens only in obedience to a higher law; and the executioner, because he presented the cup to the victim with tears.”
With this proud and plain warning ringing in their ears, the judges next heard Montalembert. He was just twenty-one, and by the recent death of his father but a few weeks in his place as a peer of France. Sainte-Beuve saw that his youth, his ease and grace, the elegant precision of his style and diction, veiled the fact that it was a prisoner—not a peer—who spoke, and his judges were the first to forget it.
“The entire chamber listened with a surprise which was not without pleasure to the young man's bold self-justification. From that day M. de Montalembert, though formally condemned, was borne in the very heart of the peerage—he was its Benjamin.” The sentence was a gentle reprimand and a mild fine of a hundred francs.
The Avenir, it will be remembered, had incurred no censure from Rome. Nevertheless, it had not prospered, and it was resolved by its founders that they would appeal to the head of the church for his explicit approval. Accordingly, the publication of the paper was suspended, and its last number announced “with pomp,” as Lacordaire says, that “the purpose of its editors was to suspend it until they had gone to Rome to seek sanction and authority for its continuation.” The biographer well remarks that “neither from primitive Ireland nor romantic Poland had such an expedition set forth.” They asked the head of the church “to commit himself, to sanction a new and revolutionary movement, to bless the very banners of revolt, and acknowledge as pioneers of his army the ecclesiastical Ishmaels who had [pg 439] carried fire and flame everywhere during their brief career.” There could, of course, be but one result—failure. The Avenir was condemned. Lacordaire and Montalembert at once submitted to the decision. Poor de Lamennais did not, and unhappily persisted in his sad mistake. In connection with this subject, we cannot here refrain from repeating at length some reflections which, coming as they do from an intelligent Protestant, have a peculiar force and value.
They are from the pen of Montalembert's biographer, and present so admirable, so eloquent a résumé of the question of apostasy, that we have not the heart to curtail the passage containing them by so much as the omission of a single word:
“Except at the Reformation, when the great overflow of spiritual rebellion was favored by such a combination of circumstances as has never occurred since, no man or group of men have succeeded in rebelling against Rome, and yet continued to keep up a religious character and influence. No man has been able to do it, whatever the excellence of his beginning might be, or the purity of the motives with which he started. Even in the Church of England the career of a man who separates himself from her communion is generally a painful one. He makes a commotion and excitement in the world for a time before he has fully made up his mind; and at the moment of his withdrawal he is sure of remark and notice, at all events, from certain classes. But after that brief moment he sinks flat as the spirits do in the Inferno, and the dark wave pours over him, and he is heard of no more. All that sustained and strengthened and gave him a fictitious importance as the member of a great corporation has fallen away from him. He has dropped like a stone into the water—like a foundered ship into the sea. In England, however, after all has been done, there is a sea of dissent to drop into, and though his new surroundings may please him little, yet he will come out of the giddiness of his downfall to take some comfort in them—will accustom himself by degrees to the lower social level, the different spiritual atmosphere. But he who dissents from the Church of Rome has no such refuge. The moment he steps outside her fold he finds himself in outer darkness, through which awful salutations are shrieked to him by the enemies of religion, by those whom he has avoided and condemned all his life, and with whom he can agree only on the one sole article of rebellion. If he ventures to hold up his head at all after what all his friends will call his apostasy, the best that he can hope for is to be courted by heretics, professed enemies of the church which he has been born in, and which probably he loves most dearly still, notwithstanding his disobedience. To quarrel with your home is one thing—to find its domestic laws hard, and its prejudices insupportable; but to plunge into the midst of the enemies of that home, and to hear it assailed with the virulence of ignorance—to join in gibes against your mother, and mockery of her life and motives—is a totally different matter. Yet this is almost all that a contumacious priest has to look forward to. A recent and striking example, to which we need not refer more plainly, will occur to every one who has watched the contemporary history of the Roman Catholic Church. In this case a brilliant and remarkable preacher—a man supposed the other day to be one of the most eminent and promising sons of Rome—after wavering and falling away in some points from ecclesiastical obedience, suddenly appeared in an admiring circle of gentle Anglicanism, surrounded by a fair crowd of worshipping Protestants, ready to extend to him all that broad and universal sympathy which he had no doubt been trained to regard as vilest latitudinarianism, or the readiness of Pilate to make friends with Herod. This prospect must chill the very soul of a man who has received the true priestly training, and who has been educated in that love of his church which is of itself a noble and generous sentiment. The best thing that can happen to him is to fall among heretics; the other alternative, and the only one, so far as events have yet made it apparent, to fall among infidels: and as his education has taught him to make but small distinction between them, and the infidels are nearer at hand, and his own countrymen, what wonder if it is into [pg 440]their hands that the miserable man, torn from all his ancient foundations, ejected from his natural place, heart-weary with the madness which is wrought by anger against those we love, should fall—what wonder if he should rush to the furthest extremity, hiding what he feels to be his shame, and endeavoring to take some dismal comfort in utter negation of that past from which he has been torn! Whether there are new developments in the future for the new Protesters whom a recent decision has raised up, we cannot tell. But such has been the case in the past. Life is over for the rebellious priest who breaks with his church; his possibility of service in his vocation has come to an end; even the most careless peasant in his parish will turn from him. He is a deserter from his regiment in the face of the enemy, false to his colors, a man no longer of any human use.”
It was during Montalembert's sojourn in Italy, on his remarkable Avenir pilgrimage, that he became the intimate friend of Albert de la Ferronays, the hero of Mrs. Craven's beautiful Récit d'une Sœur. He appears in the book designated under the name of Montal. From the same period, also, dates his intimacy with Rio, the future historian of Christian art. The young peer's taste for art, always strong, and his enthusiastic admiration of the glorious remains of mediæval architecture, were both developed and strengthened under the teaching and influence of Rio. In March, 1833, he published an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which he energetically denounced the desecration and ruin of the grand old architectural monuments of France. It was addressed in the form of a letter to Victor Hugo, then leader of the Romantic school, who strongly sympathized with him on this subject, and whose Notre Dame de Paris had been reviewed in the Avenir by Montalembert with enthusiastic praise for the grand historical framework of the story. During the autumn of that year, Montalembert went to Germany, and, as we have seen, accidentally stopped at Marburg. Travel, research, and the collection of materials for the life of Elizabeth now engrossed all his time, until, attaining the legal age, twenty-five, he took his seat in the Chamber of Peers. His first appearance at the bar of this chamber had been in defence of the liberty of teaching, and his first speech was in defence of the liberty of the press. These two discourses prefigured his parliamentary career. He was always the ardent advocate of liberty; rarely heard on the side of the government; and generally the leader of a conscientious and loyal opposition: which, well considered, would have been found the most prudent adviser of the administration in power.