And now that we are forced, reluctantly enough, to let fall the veil over that teeming life of the mediæval cloister, the fruitful nursery of every later intellectual development, shall we tell the reader what has most struck us throughout the short sketch we have been able to give of these centres of thought? Does not their history sound like some “monkish chronicle”? How is it that all the most “celebrated men of their time” (the phrase so often repeated in these annals) are monks, and so many not only monks, but saints? How is it that we come upon so many instances of these great scholars taking their turn at the mill, the forge, and the bake-house, and that these details sound neither sordid nor vulgar, as they might of modern and secular littérateurs? It was the monastic principle, the Christ-principle, as Prior Vaughan calls it in his Life of S. Thomas of Aquin—the principle of faith, obedience, purity, adoration, and reverence. “The monks had a world of their own.... Whilst the barbarians were laying all things in ruins, they, heedless alike of fame or profit, were patiently laying the foundations of European civilization. They were forming the languages of Schiller, of Bacon, and of Bossuet; they were creating arts which modern skill in vain endeavors to imitate; they were preserving the codices of ancient learning, and embalming the world ‘lying in wickedness’ with the sweet odor of their manifold virtues.”[61] Not only were they men who “wrote and spoke much, and, by their masculine genius and young and fresh inspiration, prevented the new Christian world from falling back from its first advances, either by literature or politics, under the yoke of exhausted paganism”;[62] [pg 091] not only were they men of progress even while essentially conservative, men of the future even while their studies were all of the past, but, “in opposing poverty, chastity, and obedience, the three great bases of monastic life, to the orgies of wealth, debauchery, and pride, they created at once a contrast and a remedy.”[63] Prior Vaughan, in his brilliant lifelike picture of mediævalism, S. Thomas of Aquin, perpetually refers to the ruling principle of monasticism: “To omit mention of the Benedictine principle would be to manifest great ignorance of the action of the highest form of truth upon mankind. The mastership of authority and reverence, springing out of the school of quies, did not cease to exert a considerable influence even after the dominant power of the monastic body had nearly disappeared.”[64] Elsewhere we read: “There was nothing of the sophist or logician in those sweet and venerable countenances, the unruffled beauty of which is so often dwelt upon by their biographers.... One of the marks of the age is the absence of the disputatious spirit, which, if it diminishes their rank (that of the monastic thinkers) in the world of letters, forms the charm of their characters as men. The real spirit of the age was one of reverence for tradition.”[65]
The foresight of the monk-teachers of the earlier middle ages is no less remarkable than their holiness. Everywhere they fostered the native idiom, and labored to reduce it to an intelligible grammar. The national and patriotic feeling thus awakened in the centres of learning must needs have endeared them to, and more closely linked them with, the intellectual progress of the people they instructed. A modern author observes that “Bede's words are evidence that the establishment of the Teutonic nations on the ruins of the Roman Empire did not barbarize knowledge. He collected and taught more natural truths than any Roman writer had yet accomplished, and his works display an advance, not a retrogression, in science.” Indeed, natural science seems to have been from the first a peculiarly monastic pursuit. The great names of Bede, Gerbert, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon are as a mighty chain from century to century, leading up to the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Arago, and Humboldt; while in S. Brendan we have a bold precursor of Columbus.
The monasteries were so entirely the sole centres of civilization that numberless towns owe their origin to them. Scholars came for instruction, and remained for edification; grateful patients settled near the heaven-taught physicians who had cured them; peasants clustered round the abbeys for protection, and thus grew towns and villages without number in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Italy. Even America bears to-day, in the name of one of her oldest English settlements, and a hereditary representative of intellect—Boston—a memento of the old intellectual supremacy of monasticism. S. Botolph, an Anglo-Saxon hermit, left his monastery, and settled in a hut on one of the plains of Lincolnshire. Scholars gathered around him, and, despite his remonstrances, set up other huts around his, and the Benedictine monastery of Icanhoe was founded. As time went on, a village sprang up and became a town, and was called Botolphstown. The name was afterwards corrupted and cut down into Boston, and from Boston it was that the founders of [pg 092] New England set sail on their journey to Holland, their first stage on their way to the New World.
In old times, then, monasteries created towns; now, alas, it is towns that necessitate monasteries. We have now to plant the monastic school in the midst of the teeming emporiums of trade and vice, where thousands toil harder for a bare crust and a hard board than the monks of old toiled for the kingdom of heaven. It is not to listen to a learned or holy man that settlements are made nowadays, but to dig oil-wells or work coal and iron mines. Modern towns are made by traders, eager to be beforehand with their competitors, and the journalist and the liquor-seller are the first citizens of the new town. Quies is relegated to the region of romance; it is unpractical, it “does not pay”; learning itself, if it succeeds in getting a footing in the centres of commerce, partakes of the commercial spirit, and is rather to be called “cramming” than knowledge, and, as to the moral result of the contrast between the Benedictine principle of the early ages and the principle of hurry, of contention, of money-worship current in our days, let the annals of modern crime be called upon to witness.
Versailles.
What an apotheosis of royalty the name evokes! Versailles and Louis Quatorze. As if by the stroke of the enchanter's wand, there starts up before us a long procession of heroes and poets and statesmen and wits and fair women, a galaxy of glory and beauty revolving around one central figure as satellites round their sun. We lose sight of all the dark spots upon the disc in contemplating the blaze of brightness that emanates from it. We forget the iniquitous follies of the Grand Monarque, and remember nothing but the splendors of his reign, its unparalleled monarchical triumph; we see him through a mist of proud achievements in war and peace, excellence in every branch of science and industry, fine arts and letters, all that dazzled his contemporaries still dazzles us, and even at this distance his faults and follies are, if not quite eclipsed, softened and modified in the daze of a fictitious light. The group of illustrious men who surround his throne magnify rather than diminish the individuality of the man, lending a false halo to him, as if their genius were a thing of his creation, an effect rather than a cause of his ascendency. How far, in truth, Louis may have tended to create by his personal influence, his kindly patronage and keen discrimination, that wonderful assemblage of talent in every grade which will remain for ever associated with his name, it would be difficult to determine, but, judging from the extraordinary influx of genius which signalized his reign, and the corresponding dearth of it in the succeeding ones, we are tempted to believe that he at least possessed in an almost supernatural degree the gift, so precious to a king, of divining genius wherever it did exist, and of calling it forth from its [pg 093] hiding-places, however dismal or remote, to the light of success and fame. But for the discriminating admiration of Louis, which fanned the poetic fire of the timid and sensitive Racine and stimulated the wit of the obscure and humble Molière, we should assuredly have missed some of the noblest efforts of both those poets. Louis was prodigal of his smiles to rising talent, for he knew that to it the sunshine of encouragement is as beneficent as the sun's warmth to the earth in spring-time.
But we are beginning at the end. Versailles is identified to us chiefly if not solely with Louis Quatorze and his age; but it was not so from the beginning. Once upon a time it was a marshy swamp, unhealthy and uncultivated; and, if we deny Louis the faculty of creating men of genius, we cannot refuse him that of having evolved an Eden from a wilderness. There is little indeed in the history of this early period to compensate the reader for keeping him waiting while we review it, still it is better to cast our glance back a little, not very far, a century or so, to see what were the antecedents of the site of one of the grandest historic monuments of France.
In the year 1561, Martial de Loménie was seigneur of Versailles, and was frequently honored by the visits of Henri de Navarre, who went out to hunt the stag in his subject's swampy wilderness. De Loménie sold it to Albert de Gondy, Maréchal de Retz, who in his turn was honored by the presence of his sovereign, Louis XIII., there. Louis was in the habit of indulging his favorite pastime at Versailles, but, beyond placing his land and his game at the disposal of the king, the maréchal seems to have shown scant hospitality to the royal hunter. Saint-Simon tells us that during these excursions Louis usually slept in a windmill or in a dingy inn, whose only customers were the wagoners who journeyed across that out-of-the-way place. Of the two lodgings he inclines to think the windmill was the most comfortable. Louis probably found neither quarters very luxurious, for in 1627 he purchased a piece of ground which had been in the Soisy family since the fourteenth century, and built himself a hunting-lodge on the ruins of an old manor-house there, to the great discomfiture of a large colony of owls who had made themselves at home in the moss-grown ruin. Bassompierre deplores the vandalism which swept away the venerable shelter of the owls, and declares that after all the lodge was but a sorry improvement on the windmill, being “too shabby a dwelling for even a plain gentilhomme to take conceit in.” Such as it was, it satisfied the king, and remained untouched till it was swallowed up in the great palace which was to embody all the glories of the ensuing reign. When Louis Quatorze conceived the design of building Versailles, he confided the execution of his vast idea to Mansard, laying down, however, as a primary condition that the shabby little hunting-lodge of the late king should be preserved, and comprised in the new structure. Mansard declared that this was impossible, to which Louis, with true kingly logic, replied coolly: Raison de plus.[66] No argument of artistic beauty or common sense could move him from his resolution, or induce him to sanction the demolition of the quaint little building that his father had raised. Rather than be guilty of such an unfilial act, he said he would give up the notion of his new palace altogether. Mansard had nothing for it but to give way, and pledge himself [pg 094] that the ugly red-brick lodge should stand somehow and somewhere in the magnificent pile that was already reared in his imagination. The only concession he obtained was that it should be concealed, if this were possible. Mansard swore he would make it possible, and he kept his word. The lodge of Louis XIII. was swallowed up in the elaborate stone-work of that part of the palace facing the Avenue de Paris, and remains to this day an enduring if not a very sensible proof of the filial respect of Louis XIV. This was the one solitary impediment that Louis threw in the architect's way; in everything else he gave him carte blanche, power unlimited, and all but unlimited wealth to work out his fantastic and superb conception. Simultaneously with this mighty fabric another work of almost equal magnitude had to be undertaken; this was the planting of the park and the gardens. The country for miles around the site of the palace was a swamp abounding with reptiles, and reeking with vapors of so deadly a character that the men employed in draining it died like flies of a malaria that raged like a pestilence for months together. They refused after a time to continue the work, though enormous wages were offered, and it was found necessary at last, under pain of abandoning it, to press men into the service as for the army in time of war. No accurate statistics are extant as to the number of victims who perished in the execution of this royal freak; but the most authentic opinions of the time put it at the astounding figure of twenty thousand. So much for the good old times of the ancien régime, that we are apt to invest with a sort of pathetic prestige. What were the lives of so many vilains[67] and the tears and hunger of innumerable vilaines, widows and orphans of the dead men, in comparison to the supreme pleasure of the king and the accomplishment of his omnipotent will? The death-sweat of these human cattle rained upon the swamp, and in due time it was' made wholesome, purified as so many foul spots upon the earth are by the sweat of toil and sorrow, and fitted to grow flowers and green trees that would diffuse their fragrance and spread pleasant shade where corruption and barrenness had dwelt.
Le Notre, that prince of gardeners, may be truly said to have created the pleasure-grounds of Versailles; nature had thrown many obstacles in his way, she thwarted him at every step, but her obstinate resistance only stimulated his genius to loftier flights and his indomitable energy to stronger efforts. He conquered in the end. Never was conquest more fully appreciated than Le Notre's by his royal master. Louis not only rewarded him with more than princely liberality, but admitted him to his personal intimacy, treating the plebeian artist with an affectionate familiarity that he never extended to the high and mighty courtiers who looked on in envy and admiration. Le Notre was too little of a courtier himself to value adequately the honor of the king's condescension, but he loved the man, and took no pains to conceal it; there was an expansive bonhomie, a native simplicity in his character, that, contrasting as it did with the artificial atmosphere of the court, charmed Louis, and he would listen with delight to the honest fellow's garrulity while he related, with naïve satisfaction, the tale of his early struggles and the difficult and hardy triumphs of his talent and perseverance. Versailles was, of course, to be the crowning achievement of his life, and nothing [pg 095] could exceed the diligence and ardor that he brought to bear on it. He besought the king not to inspect the works while they were in the progressive stage, but to wait, once he had seen the disposition of the ground, till they were advanced to a certain point. Louis humored him by consenting, though greatly against his inclination. He kept his word faithfully in spite of all temptations of curiosity and impatience; contenting himself with questioning Le Notre, at stated times, as to how things were getting on, but never once, in his frequent and regular visits of inspection to the palace, did he set foot within the forbidden precincts. The day came at last when his forbearance was to be rewarded. Le Notre invited him to enter the closed doors. Louis came, and found that the reality far outstripped his most sanguine expectations; he was in raptures with all he beheld, and declared himself abundantly rewarded for his patience. Le Notre, no less enchanted than the king, walked on beside his chair, doing the honors of the gardens and the park, and listening with a swelling heart to the exclamations of delight that greeted every fresh view that opened in the landscape. It seemed, indeed, as if a whole army of fairies had been at work to bring such a paradise out of chaos; long rows of stately full-grown trees, brought from a distance and transplanted into the arid soil, had taken root and were flourishing as in their native earth; winding paths intersected majestic avenues, and led the visitor, unexpectedly, to richly planted groves, where marble fauns hid coyly, as if frightened to be caught by the sunlight in their unveiled beauty; all the elves in fairyland, all the gods in Olympia, were here congregated, now astray in the green tangle of the wood, now standing in majestic groups, or peeping singly through an opening in the foliage as if they were playing hide-and-seek; water-nymphs, dashing the soft spray round their naked limbs, started unexpectedly from nooks and corners, cooling the air that was heavy with the scent of flowers; the rush of the cascade answered the laughing ripple of the fountain; from bower to bower there came a concert of water-music, such as no mortal ear had ever heard before; it was, indeed, a sight to set before a king, and the gardener might well rejoice who had worked these wonders in the desert.