“I have builded on a rock!” His word symbolic
He will make plain—the Eternal cannot fail:
“Earth shall not shake my One Church Apostolic,
Nor gates of hell prevail!”
FRENCH HOME LIFE.[[178]]
Philosophers, theologians, and political economists alike are agreed that the family is the basis of society and the type of government. Home life and teaching, therefore, is the most important thing in youth, and of whatsoever kind it is, so will be the behavior in riper years of the generation brought up in its precepts. If parents did their duty, the state would need fewer prisons; or, as a Chinese proverb more tersely puts it, “If parents would buy rods, the hangman would sell his implements.” Individual effort, however heroically it may make head against the stream, has but a hard and uncertain task in an atmosphere the very reverse of Christian and Scriptural, and in the teeth of laws becoming every day more and more antagonistic to the Ten Commandments. Still, since the spirit of the age has almost put on one side, as obsolete, the ideal of reverence for age and experience, and the respect due to parents, husbands, masters, and superiors, the preservation of the worthy traditions of Christian home-life falls necessarily to the hands of families themselves. We have to live not up to or within the laws, but beyond them, and to train our children not only as good and obedient citizens but as earnest and practical Christians. Not only in one country is this the case, nor even among the countries of one race, but everywhere, from modernized Japan to Spain, from Russia to the reservations of friendly Indians.
There is one country, however, whose modern literature and practice for a century and a half has been a synonym for looseness of teaching, for disregard of family ties, honor, authority, and restraint, for every element brilliantly and fatally disintegrating, for every moral and philosophical novelty. France is perhaps the nation most misrepresented and maligned by her public literature—at least the France whose delinquencies have been so shamelessly and with seeming enjoyment dissected before our eyes by her novelists and satirists. The sound body on whose surface these sores break out is ignored; the old tradition, rigid and artificial in many points, but made so by the very license of court and city which for ever assaulted its simplicity, is overlooked, and the decent, quiet, and strong substratum of manliness, truth, and purity underlying the froth of vice in the capital and the large towns is forgotten.
The first French Revolution was prepared by atheistical epicures, the airy and refined unbelievers of the court of Louis XIV. and XV.; and though turbulent masses here and there caught the infection, and with cruel precision put in practice against the court nobility the theories about which the latter so complacently wrote essays and epigrams, yet the rural populations still believed in God and virtue—the evil had not struck root among the body of the nation. The infidelity of the present century has completed the task left unfinished by Voltaire and Rousseau; newspapers have carried doubt and arrogance among the simple people of the country; the laws of partition have destroyed many homesteads once centres of families, and driven people into crowded and unhealthy cities; the example of a noisily prominent class of self-styled leaders has carried away the senses of otherwise sober and decent men; the increase of drunkenness has further loosened family and home ties; politics have become a mere profession, instead of the portion allotted by duty to the collective body of fathers of families, and so the old ideal is vanishing fast. Frenchmen of the right sort look despairingly into the far past of their own country, and into the history of foreign nations—English, American, Dutch, Hanoverian—for models of pure living, respect for authority, law-abidingness, and attachment to home. Some have set themselves to study Hindoo, Chinese, and Egyptian models, and to put together from the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes of Solomon, and the exhortations of Plato and Cicero, an ideal code of home-life; some have gathered together and published with loving regret the memorials of French life at its purest, of the patriarchal ideal which survived even till the seventeenth century—the age, pre-eminently, of great Frenchmen and women, and of which some shadows lingered into our own century. From the naïf advice of Louis IX., the saintly king of France, to his son and daughter, Philip and Isabel, to the family registers of small yeomen of Provençal valleys and the grave admonitions of a judge to his newly-married daughter just before the French Revolution, the same spirit breathes through the dying addresses of Christian fathers of families in what we only know as infidel and immoral France. “The seven thousand who bowed not the knee to Baal” were always represented, though the licentious courts of the Valois and the Bourbons threw a veil over the virtues of the country; not one class alone, but all, from the titled proprietor to the small tradesman and struggling ménager, or yeoman, contributed its quota of redeeming virtue. But it is noticeable that the majority of these upright men were poor. They could not afford to be idle; they had large families to support; they had their patrimony to keep in the family, and, if possible, to increase. All the customs that we are going to see unrolled before us, the sentiments expressed, the simple, dull, serious life led, are utterly alien from anything we call technically French. We shall be surprised at every page, but less so if we remember that this patriarchal life was generally spent in the country, and often in mountainous regions and severe climates. While reading of these scenes some may be reminded of a story placed in a singular region in the south of France,—the Camargue, not far from Aigues-Mortes—in which Miss Bowles has embodied the characteristic traits of a magnificent, healthy, hardy, and upright race. One of these Provençal farms had much in common with some described in that book.
The reason which makes the author of La Vie Domestique choose the Courtois family register as the first subject of his two volumes is that it is the latest that has come to his knowledge; and reproducing, almost in our own generation, the traits of a vanished society, it is of more interest and of greater weight as a possible model. The author of it, descended from a family of lawyers and judges at least two hundred years old, died in 1828, and his descendants still live in the valley of Sault—one of those natural republics not uncommon in mountainous districts—retired from the outer world, faithful to ancestral tradition, and governing themselves patriarchally according to their old and never-interrupted communal liberties. There is a vast field for research, and more for meditation, in the liberties of the old mediæval states north and south of the Pyrenees; it is startling to see what bold claims the parliaments of Aragon and Navarre could enforce, and their Spartan disregard of the kingly office unless joined to almost perfect virtue. But centralization, the genius of our time, has ruthlessly declared that sort of liberty antiquated, and, after the decay of the despotism which the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began, the liberty of the individual was insisted on rather than that of the commonwealth.