A FRENCH POET.[28]
It is often said among those who assert much and investigate little that the control of science, of literature, and of art has passed beyond the domain of the ancient church, that her children have given up the contest, and that she no longer produces distinguished men. It seems to be an understood thing that sound Catholicism is not consistent with proficiency in any branch of the higher pursuits, and that every artist, scientist, and littérateur ceases to be a good Christian in proportion as he is successful in his profession. There has been some apparent excuse for such an impression gaining ground, but it is none the less an erroneous impression. Especially of late years has it been triumphantly refuted, and nowhere with more éclat than in the very stronghold, the sanctum sanctorum of free thought and private judgment—England. There has arisen in that land of successful and jubilant materialism, that citadel of rationalism in matters of religion, a knot of men formidable for their learning, their eloquence, their taste, and their wit. But if even in England, under the shadow that was yet left hanging over the church from the effects of three hundred years of repression, the vitality of the old "olive-tree"[29] was amply proved by the grafting in and prosperous growth of so many new branches, still more was the fruitfulness of the ancient mother and mistress of all knowledge shown forth in Catholic France. That country has suffered sorely; it has been the experimental plaything of the world, it has been torn by unchristian politicians, gagged by Cæsarism, drenched in blood by demagogism; it has been deluged with a literature as shameless as it was attractive, until the name of France has become identified in the minds of many with deliberate and organized immorality. It is asserted that the names of her most famous novelists are synonymes of licentiousness; that her philosophers openly preach the grossest materialism; and that those of her littérateurs who are not absolute libertines are undisguised Sybarites. Never was country so thoroughly and deplorably misrepresented as this Catholic land, whence have come three-fourths of the missionaries of the world, armies of Sisters of Charity, the most impetuous and the bravest of the Pope's defenders, the most indefatigable scientific explorers, the purest of political reformers. If France must be judged by her literature, she can point to Montalembert, Ozanam, Albert de Broglie, Eugénie de Guérin, Louis Veuillot, Dupanloup, Rio, Lacordaire, Mme. Craven, Pontmartin, La Morvonnais, as well as to Balzac, Dumas, Eugène Sue, George Sand, and Alfred de Musset. If by her art, De la Roche, Ary Scheffer, Hippolyte Flandrin, vindicate her old Catholic historical pre-eminence; if by her science and her philosophy, there are Ampère, Berryer, Villemain, even Cousin. Everywhere the old sap is coursing freely, and in the ranks of all professions are champions ready to do battle for the old faith that made France a "grande nation." But those we have mentioned, especially the distinguished and brilliant cluster, Montalembert, de Broglie, Lacordaire, and Dupanloup, had eschewed the old legitimist traditions, and, without detracting from their fame, we may say that they were eminently men of the XIXth century. The charm and poetry of chivalry, fidelity to an exiled race, the spell of the white flag and the golden fleur-de-lis, were in their minds things of the past; noble and beautiful weapons, it is true, but useless for the present emergency, like the enamelled armor and jewelled daggers which we reverently admire in our national museums. The old monarchical traditions needed a champion in the field of literature where their conscientious and respectful opponents were so brilliantly represented, and this they found in Jean Reboul, the subject of this memoir.
One would have thought that the legitimist poet would have arisen from some lonely castle of Brittany, and have borne a name which twenty generations of mediæval heroes had made famous in song. One would have pictured him as the melancholy, high-spirited descendant of Crusaders, orphaned by the Vendean war, inspired by the influence of the ocean and the majestic solitude of the landes.[30]
He would be likely to be a Christian Byron, a modern Ossian, far removed from contact with the world, almost a prophet as well as a poet. But as if to render his personality more marked, and his partisanship more striking, the champion of legitimacy was none of these things. Instead of being a noble, he was a baker; instead of a solitary, a busy man of the world—even a deputy in the French Assembly in 1840. Who would have dreamt this? Yet when God chose a king for Israel, he did not call a man of exalted family to the throne, but "a son of Jemini of the least tribe of Israel, and his kindred the last among all the families of the tribe of Benjamin."[31] So it fell out with the representative who, among the constellation of more than ordinary brilliancy which marked the beginning of this century in France, was to uphold the old political faith of the land. There was doubtless some wise reason for this singular and unexpected choice. Reboul was a man of the people, a worker for his bread, that it might be known what the people could do when led by faith and loyalty; he was from Nîmes, in the south of France, not far from Lyons and Marseilles, that his attitude might be a perpetual protest against the wave of communism and revolution which had its source in the south; he was, so to speak, a descendant of the Romans—for Nîmes was a flourishing Roman colony and its people are said to retain much of the massiveness of the Roman character—that he might rebuke the mistaken notion of those who make of the old republic a type of modern anarchy, and desecrate the names of Lucretia and Cornelia by bestowing them on the tricoteuses[32] of 1793, or the pétroleuses of 1870. It must have been a special consolation to the exiled representative of the Bourbons, the object of such devoted and romantic loyalty, to follow the successes and receive the outspoken sympathy of so unexpected and so staunch an adherent. Uncompromising in his championship of the "drapeau blanc," Reboul was politically a host in himself, and, untrammelled as he was by the traditions and prejudices that hedged in the nobles of the party, he was able to mingle with all classes, speak to all men, treat with all parties, and yet to carry his allegiance through all obstacles, unimpaired and even unsuspected.
Jean Reboul was born at Nîmes on the 23d of January, 1796. His father was a locksmith and in very modest circumstances. His mother was early left a widow, with four young children to provide for. Jean, who was the eldest, and of an equally thoughtful and energetic character, soon contrived to relieve her of the anxieties of her position, by establishing himself in business as a baker. Whatever ambitious and vague longings he might have had even at that early period we do not know, but can easily guess at, and his sacrifice of them already endears the future poet to our hearts. How he ever after preferred the claims of his family to his own convenience, and refused to take from them the security which his lowly trade gave them, and which the precarious success of a literary career might have taken away, we shall see later on. But Reboul did not forego his poetical aspirations; he published various detached pieces in the local journals of Nîmes, he circulated MS. poems among his friends, and his name began to be well known at least in his native town. It was not till 1820, however, that the outside world and the literary assemblies of Paris knew him. He gave half his day to the labor of his trade and half to intellectual work and hard study, and the activity of his character, as well as the rigorous measurement of his time, so arranged as never to waste a moment, made this division of labor prejudicial to neither one employment nor the other.
In physique he was tall, athletic, and stately enough for a Roman senator. His features were cast in a large and massive mould, his dark, brilliant eyes were full of meridional fire, and his abundant black hair seemed a fitting frame for his manly, fearless countenance. Even in old age and when dying, a friend and admirer recorded that "his face has suffered no contraction, but has wholly kept the purity of those sculptural lineaments so nobly reproduced by the chisel of Pradier; it even seemed to have borrowed a new and graver majesty from the dread approach of death; ... even death appeared, as it were, to hesitate to touch his form, and seemed to draw near its victim with the deepest respect." His vigorous life, his active intelligence, his inflexible uprightness of character—everything seemed to point him out as a man beyond the common run of even good men. We shall see his character as developed in the admirable letters which form the basis of this sketch. Type of a Christian patriot, he towers above his contemporaries by sheer nobility of soul, and is an example of that moral stature to which no worldly honors, no political position, no hereditary rank can add "one cubit." Pro Deo, Patria et Rege was his lifelong motto, and it may safely be said that if France had many such sons, no one in the past or in the future could have rivalled or could hope to rival "la grande nation."
His first volume of collected poems was published in 1836, and one by one eminent men of letters, struck by the beauty, severity, and freshness of his diction, sought out the new light and entered into brotherhood with him. His lifelong friendship with M. de Fresne, however, dated from 1829, when he had already published The Angel and the Child,[33] in a Paris magazine, and other pieces at various intervals in local periodicals. A traveller from the capital knocked at the unknown poet's door, and the tie knit by the first external homage that had yet come to Reboul, was never dissolved. The letters from which we draw his portrait, as traced by himself, were all addressed to this first friend. In 1838, another and more illustrious visitor came to the baker's home at Nîmes, the patriarch of revived Christian literature in France, the immortal Châteaubriand. He tells the story of his visit himself:
"I found him in his bakery, and spoke to him without knowing to whom I was speaking, not distinguishing him from his companions in the trade of Ceres; he took my name, and said he would see if the person I wanted was at home. He came back presently and smilingly made himself known to me. He took me through his shop, where we groped about in a labyrinth of flour-sacks, and at last climbed by a sort of ladder into a little retreat (réduit) something like the chamber of a windmill. There we sat down and talked. I was as happy as in my barn in London,[34] and much happier than in my minister's chair in Paris."
Reboul was an ardent Catholic, an uncompromising "ultramontane," as their enemies designate those who refuse to render unto Cæsar the things that are God's. He took a keen and sensitive interest in the struggles of religion against infidelity, the prototypes, or rather the counterparts, of those we see now waging in Italy and Germany. On the occasion of one of these attacks on the church in 1844, he writes these trenchant words: