French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

Two opinions found expression when the Sermons of Bossuet were first published, in 1772; I have already indicated that of the Abbé Maury, who placed these sermons above everything else of that kind which the French pulpit had produced; the other opinion, which was that of La Harpe, and which I have known to be shared since by other sensible men, was less enthusiastic and showed itself more sensitive to the inequalities and to the discordances of tone. It would be possible to justify both of these opinions, with the understanding that the first should triumph in the end, and that the genius of Bossuet, there as elsewhere, should keep the first rank. It is very true that, read continuously, without any notice of the age of the writer, and of the place and circumstances of their composition, some of these discourses of Bossuet may offend or surprise minds that love to dwell upon the more uniform and more exact continuity of Bourdaloue or of Massillon.

Victor Cousin is one among the somewhat numerous writers who, within the bounds of this same paper on Bossuet, fall under the touch of Sainte-Beauve’s critical lance, that weapon borne ever in rest and ready for any encounter:

A great writer of our days, M. Cousin ... has been disposed once more to despoil Louis XIV. of his highest glory in order to carry it all back to the epoch preceding. M. Cousin has a convenient method of exaggerating and aggrandizing the objects of his admiration: he degrades or depresses their surroundings. It is thus that, to exalt Corneille, in whom he sees Æschylus, Sophocles, all the Greek tragic poets united, he sacrifices and diminishes Racine; it is thus that, in order the better to celebrate the epoch of Louis XIII. and of the regency which followed, he depresses the reign of Louis XIV.

It is Sainte-Beuve’s specialty—in aim, whether in achievement or not—to be without the tendency thus charged upon M. Cousin, to violate proportion in his criticism. The insinuating delicacy of his adverse, or at least disparaging, critical judgment toward a distinguished contemporary author is well exemplified in the following passage, in which the critic, by his instinct as critic, is irresistibly drawn to make a return to Cousin. The wise reader familiar with Mr. Matthew Arnold will see how exactly the latter caught from his French master the trick of method here displayed:

Ah, I cannot refrain from expressing another thought. When M. Cousin speaks so at his ease of Louis XIV., of Louis XIII., and of Richelieu, confidently attributing superiority to that which he prefers and which he thinks resembles him, I am astonished that he has never once asked himself this question: “What would have been the gain, what the loss to my own talent, this talent which is daily compared with that of the writers of the great age—what would have been gained or lost to that admirable talent” (I forget that it is he that is speaking) “if I had had to write or to discourse, were it but for a few years, in the very presence of Louis XIV., that is to say, of that royal good sense, calm, sober, and august? And that which I should have thus gained or lost, in my vivacity and my eloquence, would it not have been precisely that which it lacks in the way of gravity, of proportion, of propriety, of perfect justice, and, consequently, of true authority?”

Lamartine does not escape still another light thrust from this dangerous delicate lance, aimed yet again, with exquisite accuracy, through an unquestionable joint in the victim’s harness:

“These two rivals in eloquence,” says M. de Lamartine, speaking of Bossuet and of Bourdaloue, “were passionately compared. To the shame of the time, the number of Bourdaloue’s admirers surpassed in a short time that of the enthusiastic devotees of Bossuet. The reason of this preference for a cold argumentation above a sublime eloquence lies in the nature of human things. The men of middling stature have more resemblance to their age than the giants have to their contemporaries. The orators who deal in argument are more easily comprehended by the multitude than the orators who are fired with enthusiasm; one must have wings to follow the lyric orator.” ... This theory, invented expressly to give the greatest glory to the lyric orators and to the giants, is here at fault. M. de Bausset, author of a work on Bossuet, has remarked, on the contrary, as a kind of singularity, that it never entered any man’s head at that time to consider Bossuet and Bourdaloue as subject of comparison, and to weigh in the balance their merit and their genius, as was so often done in the case of Corneille and of Racine; or, at least, if they were compared, it was but very seldom. To the honor and not to the shame of the time, the public taste and sentiment took note of the difference. Bossuet, in the higher sphere of the episcopate, remained the oracle, the doctor, a modern Father of the Church, the great orator, who appeared on funeral and majestic occasions; who sometimes re-appeared in the pulpit at the monarch’s request, or to solemnize the assemblies of the clergy, leaving on each occasion an overpowering and ineffaceable recollection of his eloquence. Meanwhile Bourdaloue continued to be for the age the usual preacher by eminence, the one who gave a connected course of lectures on moral and practical Christianity, and who distributed the daily bread in its most wholesome form to all the faithful. Bossuet has said somewhere, in one of his sermons: “If it were not better suited to the dignity of this pulpit to regard the maxims of the Gospel as indubitable than to prove them by reasoning, how easily could I show you,” etc. There, where Bossuet would have suffered from stooping and subjecting himself to too long a course of proof and to a continuous argumentation, Bourdaloue, who had not the same impatience of genius, was, beyond doubt, an apostolic workman who was more efficient in the long run, and better fitted for his task by his constancy. The age in which both appeared had the merit to make this distinction, and to appreciate each of them without opposing one to the other; and to-day those who glory in this opposition, and who so easily crush Bourdaloue with Bossuet, the man of talent with the man of genius, because they think they are conscious themselves of belonging to the family of geniuses, too easily forget that this Christian eloquence was designed to edify and to nourish still more than to please or to subdue.

The “bright consummate flower” of Bossuet’s eloquence is to be found in his Funeral Discourses. Of one of these, Sainte-Beuve, with a sudden sympathetic swell of kindred eloquence in description, speaks, in a passage with quotation from which we close our exemplifications of this famous critic:

The death of the Queen of England came to offer him (1669) the grandest and most majestic of themes. He needed the fall and the restoration of thrones, the revolution of empires, all the varied fortunes assembled in a single life, and weighing upon one and the same head; the eagle needed the vast depth of the heavens, and, below, all the abysses and the storms of the ocean.