COUNT FREDERICK LEOPOLD STOLBERG[[88]]
Count Stolberg, a well-known statesman and writer, a minister of the Duke of Oldenburg, the friend of Goethe, Schlegel, Klopstock, Lavater, Stein, John and Adam Müller, La Motte Fouqué, Körner, and others as distinguished, the correspondent of most of the German historians, philosophers, and savants of his day, became a Catholic, after seven years’ anxious seeking for truth, on the 1st of June, 1800, at Münster, in Westphalia, in the fifty-first year of his age. He immediately retired from public life, although circumstances afterwards brought him before Germany as a representative man; and his writings spread through all classes of his countrymen as a worthy and dignified exposition of a religion at that time much reviled, misunderstood, and in some cases persecuted. His example in home-life was as powerful in a smaller circle as his writings were in a wider one; and his relations with his wife and children (he had eighteen children by his two marriages) were such as to make it true of him that he was a model for all Christian heads of families. His own tastes were simple and domestic; he was fond of the country, and was a childlike companion even to his youngest children, while to all, as they grew up, he was a wise friend and teacher. All his children, except Mariagnes, his eldest daughter by his first marriage, became Catholics with him; those born after his conversion were of course brought up in the church. His second wife, Sophie, Countess von Redern, had shared his doubts and his experiences during those seven years of eager search after religious certainty, and became a Catholic also; but while he remained in intimate and sympathetic relations with his brothers and sisters, he never influenced any of them far enough to make them follow his footsteps. His brother Christian and his wife Luise were his most constant and intimate correspondents; with the former religion seemed to make no difference, as his admiration for, and sympathy with, Stolberg was proof against anything—indeed, Stolberg often called him his “other self”; and the latter, to judge by her letters, was a woman of more than common understanding, a student of science, an observer of the times, whose mind was open to receive any new impression that had the semblance of truth or real progress in it; an investigating and impartial searcher, better versed than most women in classic learning, and eager for knowledge in any shape. To give up constant intercourse with his own family and remove to a Catholic city was the hardest sacrifice Stolberg had to make on leaving the Lutheran communion; but he considered the change imperative for the proper education of his children. In a letter to Luise announcing this resolve he says: “There is no dilemma, but, even if there were, you will agree with me that a tender conscience, in a doubtful case, must always choose against its wishes—I mean its natural wishes, which are always suspicious to upright morals, let alone to Christianity.” To his friend Princess Gallitzin, the mother of the zealous missionary in America, Demetrius Gallitzin, he says: “It is an unspeakable joy to me that my brother and sister-in-law remain bound to me in the fullest and most unreserved love, and that not even the shadow of a misunderstanding has come between them and me, however painful to them is the separation from me, from Sophie, and from the children.”
He took a house in Münster and made it his home for thirteen years, living there through the winter and spending his summers at a country-house a few miles out of the city, at Lütjenbeck. His children’s studies were his first care. Greek being his favorite study, he made each of his sons a good Greek scholar, and kept up his own studies by a repeated round of all the great authors, read successively with each of his many boys. Ernest and Andrew, the sons of his first marriage, were his first pupils, and his own teaching was supplemented in languages and history by a French emigré, the Abbé Pierrard, and in philosophy by some professors resident in Münster. Stolberg did not neglect the physical education of his boys, and would no more dispense with the daily walk, ride, or swim than he would with the studies. His sons were good shots, too, and in the summer he and they spent most of their time in the open air. Their mother writes of them that they are “truthful, generous, and good-hearted,” and “that their tender respect for their great father increases day by day.” She was herself a patient and judicious teacher, and fully recognized how much harm is done to children, and the “quiet workings of God’s influence disturbed in them, by the expectation of hurried development and individuality.” Stolberg was already beginning his literary work in the interests of religion and education, and in 1801 was translating St. Augustine’s De Vera Religione. The early Fathers were his favorite spiritual reading; also the Greek Testament and the Hebrew version of the Old Testament. He wisely resolved to lead a retired life, and not enter into what is called society; but he gathered round him a circle of real friends, in intercourse with whom he spent many hours, especially in the evenings. Among these were Princess Gallitzin, to whom we owe the suggestion that produced Stolberg’s great work, The History of the Religion of Jesus Christ; Prince Fürstenberg, an old man of very exemplary life; Kellermann, his friend and pupil, and the tutor of his younger sons for sixteen years—a priest who was the model of his order; some of the cathedral chapter, learned and enlightened men; and many young people, friends of his children, among whom the latter afterwards found wives and husbands, in all cases happily acceptable to their parents. Whoever has read the real-life idyl of A Sister’s Story will see some likeness between the home of the La Ferronays and Stolberg’s happy home. Indeed, his friends were part of his family, and admission to his intimacy became the ambition of all such in Münster as had minds beyond the common run, and aspirations beyond those of fashion, politics, and frivolity. Stolberg’s dislike to the loss of time involved in ordinary visits and the inanities of society is thus described by himself in 1810:
“I am growing more unfit from year to year for large gatherings. Intercourse with friends, like the leaves of the Sibylline books, is more precious the less time it occupies and the less often it recurs. To hear social chatter for more than an hour affects me so that I feel much like a dead donkey.... How true are Lavater’s words: 'Even the circle of good souls seldom gives me a new impulse, and a thousand trivial pleasures rob me of true enjoyment. Only solitude can shadow and cool my spirit, thirsty and weary from the company even of loved ones; only solitude can give what no friend can offer—a new consciousness and new life, and a feeling that God loves me.’”
This country life which was such a relief and yearly joy to the whole family is charmingly described in Stolberg’s letters. His garden, his hay-field, his children’s play; his walks in the beech, oak, and maple woods; the squirrels in the trees, the favorite kid of his little girls, the nightingales, the blossoming fruit-trees that suggested to him the saying that the “apple-tree did not eat of the apple”; the grottos, rocks, valleys, castles, torrents of the neighborhood of Stolberg; the old family house which he had not seen for twenty-eight years, and upon which he prided himself as a possession that had been in the family for a thousand years; the beauties of the Erzgebirg, and the Bohemian hills that lean against it; the Scotch or Norwegian-like scenery, wild and grand, of these mountains with their narrow, fruitful valleys and green meadows, fringed with dark pine woods—are all described with that heartiness and enthusiasm which real lovers of the country know, but which, as Stolberg says, so many others pretend to, while in reality they see in nature nothing but a cold show, a theatre decoration. “They look complacently as into a peep-show at the sunrise and the heavens, but their heart does not swell within them nor their eyes grow dim.” He was as fond of childish games, especially of blowing soap-bubbles, as he was of beautiful scenery, and counted it a sign of soul-health when he was in the frame of mind to enjoy such games. And now that we have before us the picture of the man in his domestic life, who in his public, political, literary, and social life was of so much importance and had so wide an influence, we will keep mostly to his own letters, which give full vent to his opinions on the important events of the time, and show him forth as emphatically of the old school, a model Christian, a thorough gentleman, but a man of his own generation; impatient of novelty, a great admirer of the English constitution, but a scornful contemner of the mushroom constitutions of the Continent; a hot Légitimiste, but a patriotic German; an uncompromising and somewhat irrational foe of Napoleon, over and above his mere national antagonism against the great and successful warrior—for instance, he believed that “Napoleon’s greatness was kneaded out of the abjectness of Europe,” forgetting that a man’s greatness may lie precisely in the art of taking advantage of a weakness inherent in an adversary, and seizing the right moment to overwhelm small minds with his stronger one; a firm believer in the necessity of his own order, but an “aristocrat” with lofty and beautiful theories of what aristocracy consists in; in a word, a great Christian and a thorough man.
Besides his Greek and Hebrew studies, he was fond of English history and literature, and knew French and Italian well; Milton and Young were his favorite English poets, though he often quotes Shakspere too, and one of his works, second only to the History of Religion, was the Life of Alfred—a man whom he looked upon as a heroic model, and whose example he wished to dwell upon as a guide to his sons through life. He also translated the whole of Ossian. His letters relating to his home-life, his losses and those of his relations, the death of his sons and son-in-law, and of many dear friends, full as they are of Christian manliness and resignation, and of moral axioms that might be taken as mottoes, we will pass by, as they have less of individuality than his letters containing opinions on religion, politics, and literature, as well as expositions of theories of his own, all strongly and conscientiously held. He firmly contradicted a current misconception in his time—and, indeed, a not unfrequent one now—of the intolerance of the Catholic Church.
“Only for those who confess Catholic truth,” he writes, “and yet consciously keep aloof from the Catholic communion, is there no hope of salvation. Of others who err in all good faith, my church teaches me to believe that they are her members, though unknowingly. God allows many honest Protestants to remain in error, and to fancy that the Catholic Church, that truly merciful mother, is intolerant against those outside her pale. It is not the true spirit of that church to persecute, curse, or burn the erring. Infallible in her doctrine, as were also the teachers who sat in Moses’ seat, she still cannot preserve all her members free from imperfections in their acts—not even the pope, nor, in the old dispensation, the high-priest.”
In another letter he says:
“Far be it from me, as it is from every Catholic who knows the spirit of his church, to doubt that among Protestants also there are and have been holy souls—holy in the sense in which all true children of God are holy; ... but my church teaches me to look upon these as unconscious members of the true, though to them unknown, church.”
“Overberg, of whose rarely beautiful catechism thirty thousand copies have been sold, especially for schools and children, expresses himself very pleasingly on this subject. No well-instructed Catholic has any objection to make to this, but even no half-taught Catholic can, on the other hand, mistake other altars for that altar of sacrifice which Malachi prophesied of, and will hold all other altars only for such as they really are.... Among unlearned Protestants (and, as I said before, among a few learned ones) there are very many whom the spirit of Protestantism as such has not touched, who have never been disturbed, because they have found in Holy Scripture a full rest and contentment, and lean with heartfelt love on Jesus Christ, doing for love of him all they do, in fullest confidence, and what flesh and blood would never teach them to do. Plants that bear such fruit as this I can only hold to come from roots watered by the Heavenly Father himself. You believe [he is addressing Sulzer, of Constance] that the number of such souls is small; and such a belief grieves me, for I think that it drives many away and discourages them. And, indeed, such hard suppositions as you make and insist upon having categorically answered lead to embittering results. I speak from experience. For seven years did I seek for truth with an upright heart, after God first put it into my heart to seek. After seven years’ search was I led, through circumstances that God overruled, to know and confess the truth. Others have sought longer and more anxiously, and have not found what I did, but they serve God in the simplicity of their hearts better than I do, and will assuredly find the truth in the kingdom of light and truth....”