HENRI LACORDAIRE.[3]
There are few of the leaders or servants of the public who interest the general mind so profoundly as the great preachers, whose fame reaches the humblest as well as the most exalted, and within the reach of whose influence, more or less, an entire generation passes. Not to reckon the secondary class of preachers, whose biography is as inevitable as their decease, and whose lives are studied as a matter of religious duty by vast sections of the population who lie in a kind of underground out of the reach of ordinary literature, it is enough to instance such a life as that of Chalmers, to prove how wide a hold upon the public interest is taken by a man with whom, for once in their lives, most people of his generation have come in momentary contact in the slight but often momentous relation of hearers to a speaker. Only a very limited number can or do hear a great speaker in any other kind, compared with those who think it indispensable to hear the notable preacher of their day; and multitudes who have the most visionary conception of their rulers and statesmen, and all other public notabilities, have a certain personal knowledge of the orator whose sphere is the pulpit, which makes them as eager to hear his life as if their own history were somehow involved in it. The life which we have now to unfold to our readers is, however, one with which in this country we are unfamiliar. It is a religious existence of a fashion unknown to us. A strange atmosphere breathes out of its acts and sentiments; its strength and its feebleness are alike novel to our experience; but under all these puzzling distinctions, the life itself is very remarkable—interwoven with the entire history of its country and period—and opens to us so strange yet so instructive a glimpse of a Christianity not less fervent, pure, and true, than anything in our Protestant records, but couched in terms so different from ours, and wearing an aspect so unlike, that the mingled resemblance and dissimilarity add a charm to its own merits. The life of Henri Lacordaire, priest, preacher, and monk, told by his eloquent countryman and loving friend, M. de Montalembert, is for us not only a religious biography, but a novel study of character and life. The picture is fascinating but strange. Stranger than the eremites in the ancient wilderness, or those early followers of Benedict and Francis, with whom the same hand has lately made us familiar, is the apparition of the monk of the nineteenth century as he appears in these pages. For it is no picturesque lay figure which rises in the white Dominican tunic before our unaccustomed eyes, but a modern Frenchman, acute, brilliant, unimpassioned—full of sound sense and inexorable logic—a politician, a liberal, a man of his day, no less than a great preacher and a pious Catholic. The story of his life is without private events, for he was a priest, and debarred from any private life save that which makes a passion of friendship and finds an outlet there; but his career is that of a man strong in personal identity, who acts and thinks for himself, and throws his entire being into his occupation, whatever that may be. M. de Montalembert, always eloquent, is perhaps too rhetorical and declamatory for biography, at least in narrating a life which to a great extent he shared, and the vicissitudes of which, as he records them, naturally rouse his enthusiasm, his indignation, and grief, and tempt him into many digressions. The volume which he has dedicated to the memory of his friend is more of anelogethan a biography, and the lines of the picture are vague in consequence, and want the distinctness of portrait-painting; nevertheless the figure rounds out of its dim background into unquestionable individuality, and the English reader who has not already heard of the great French preacher will herein meet with another man well worthy the remembrance of the world.
Henri Lacordaire was born in the beginning of the present century, almost a contemporary of our own great preacher Edward Irving, in whose life one remarkable point of resemblance shows only the full force of the contrast between the French priest and the Scotch pastor. He was of moderate origin, undistinguished either in his birth or training, without any brilliant prognostics to mark the beginning of his career. It is thus that his biographer sums up the simple story of his early days:—
“Nothing could be more simple or ordinary than the life of this young priest. Those who seek romances or stormy passages in the lives of historical personages, or at least in their youth, must find them elsewhere. No adventure, no stroke of fate or of passion, troubled the course of his early years. The son of a village doctor, educated by a pious mother, he had, like almost all the young men of the time, lost his faith at college, and did not regain it either in the school of law or at the bar, where he ranked for two years among the advocates. In appearance nothing distinguished him from his contemporaries. He was a Deist, like all the youth of the time; he was, above all, liberal, like all France, but without excess. He shared the convictions and the generous delusions which we all breathed in the air which had been purified by the downfall of imperial despotism, but he desired only a liberty strong and legitimate; and without having yet been enlightened by the lights of faith, he already foresaw the supreme danger of modern society, for at twenty he wrote ‘Impiety leads to depravity,’ ‘Corrupt morals produce corrupt laws,’ and ‘Licence carries the nations on to slavery.’ He himself remained always virtuous and regular in his morals, without any other passion than for glory. Even before he became a Christian he respected himself.”
Life, however, soon quickened into warmer bloom, in the heart of this virtuous young heathen. Providence had other occupation for him than the practice of the French bar, and the excitement of those politics which present such a fantastic succession of revolution and stagnation, violence and apathy. He woke up out of his classic convictions into Christian life, and with characteristic promptitude, as soon as he believed, devoted himself to the service of religion. “Neither man nor book was the instrument of his conversion,” says his biographer. “A sudden and secret touch of grace opened his eyes to the nothingness of irreligion. In one day he became a Christian, and the next, being a Christian, determined to become a priest.” This prompt and clear spirit, swiftly logical, unimpassioned, and master of itself, pervaded his entire life. It was not argument or exhortation that convinced him. He perceived in his rapid young soul—aware as he was of forces in himself which must have work to occupy them, and of unspeakable want in the world around him—“the nothingness of irreligion”—a notable and significant discovery. That elegant, classic, unproductive blank of Pagan virtue—could anything ever come of it, even in its highest development? Swiftly the alternative presented itself to the young Frenchman. Out of this “nothingness” he did not come by halves. From the first freedom of his young manhood and accomplished education, he went back again steadily to the rules and studies of a new training. After three years at the seminary of St Sulpice he became a priest, at a time when priests had little honour and no popularity in France. The young advocate, glowing with all the inspirations of undeveloped eloquence—a man destined to play so notable a part in his generation, and no doubt aware in his heart of the genius which nobody else as yet suspected—fell, in the flush of his youth, into obscure priestly offices, such as doubtless demonstrated to him a “something” in the Christian faith enough to exercise and employ all the helpful energies of man. He became the almoner of a convent, then of a college, following the common order of the youthful priesthood. Except the fact that he had thus suddenly, by prompt exercise of will, joined himself to that unpopular class, nothing as yet appeared to distinguish him from his brethren. “The only thing singular in him was his liberalism,” says M. de Montalembert. “By a phenomenon then unheard of, this convert, this seminarist, this almoner of nuns, was steadfast in remaining a liberal, as in the days when he was only a student and advocate.” This was, to bystanders, the one remarkable feature in him—he was a priest, and yet he was a liberal—to wit, a radical, a democrat, all but a republican. From his convent he wrote like any other enthusiastic young man, in the days when men found a gospel in political privileges, of “the imprescriptible rights of the human race.” His dream was to place these imprescriptible rights under the protection of the Church—to ally the old religion with the new freedom. “Christianity is not a law of slavery,” he wrote, in youthful boldness, from his “little convent of the Visitandines,” when Paris surged with the subterranean heavings of the Revolution of July. “She has not forgot that her children were free when all the world groaned under the iron of so many horrible Cæsars; and that they created, underground, a society of men who spoke of humanity under the palace of Nero.” “In his youth and his solitude,” he who had forsaken the bar and its triumphs, the world and its ways, for the humble offices of the priesthood, arrived at this conclusion which nobody else had dreamed of. It is a conclusion which, since then, has been tried on a sufficiently large scale and found impracticable, but it is not the less an idea which must have been full of charms and of inspiration to the young priest, whom a higher call than that of political right or wrong had drawn within the bosom of an institution supposed, and with justice, to be the foe of liberty.
Across this calm and soft perspective—from which the young priest, palpitating with all the impulses of youth and genius, looked forth with hopes that seem Utopian, and warm ideal conceptions of good and glory yet to be attained—a light more brilliant suddenly streams. This path of life, as yet so humble, enveloped in profound personal obscurity, unknown to man, is suddenly crossed by a dazzling meteoric radiance, and thrown into strong illumination before the world. It is the Abbé de Lamennais, strange Quixote of French religious history, who suddenly appears upon the scene, without introduction or description, with a suddenness somewhat confusing to an English reader, who is less instructed in the notable facts and persons of Gallican ecclesiastical history in recent years, than the audience which M. de Montalembert especially addresses. The point of junction between the distinguished ecclesiastic of La Chenaie and the young almoner of the Visitandines, is this same belief common to both, that the Church, so far from being the enemy, ought to be the chief supporter of political freedom. M. de Lamennais, “then the most celebrated and the most venerated of French priests,” had started from the opposite ground of high ultramontane Papalism, but, by dint of the lofty view taken by a lofty and visionary though wilful and uncertain mind, of that unique spiritual despotism, had come to the conclusion—a conclusion falsified by all experience, but not inconceivable in theory—that the Holy Father of Christendom ought to be the guardian of all men’s liberties. It was 1830, a year of Revolution,—another violent crisis had come in the fortunes of France. The freedom, the boldness, the bewilderment of such a sudden change of affairs, excited and stirred up all questions and spirits. This new theory of the small but enthusiastic religious band, which aimed at nothing less than re-conquering for the Church the love and heart of the country, came into the field with many others. It is at this point that M. de Montalembert, who for some little time has been preluding tenderly in strains of love and lamentation, suddenly dashes into his story, and introduces us, with an affectionate abruptness, into this agitated society, to the beginning of his friendship with Lacordaire, and to the person and character of his friend.
“It was in November 1830 that I saw him for the first time in the cabinet of the Abbé de Lamennais,” he writes, “four months after a revolution which seemed for a moment to confound in a common ruin the throne and the altar, and one month after the beginning of the journal ‘L’Avenir.’ The motto of this journal was—Dieu et la liberté!It was intended by its founders to regenerate Catholic opinion in France, and to seal its union with the progress of liberalism. I hastened to take part in this work, with the ardour of my twenty years, from Ireland, where I had just seen O’Connell at the head of a people whose invincible fidelity to the Catholic faith had worn out three centuries of persecution, and whose religious emancipation had just been won by the free press and freedom of speech. A very small number of laymen shared the convictions of M. de Lamennais, with a still more limited number of priests. Among the latter, the Abbé Lacordaire, whom as yet no one knew, was named to me. Not only was he not of those who had made themselves a name by reproducing the doctrines of the celebrated author of ‘L’Essai sur l’Indifference,’ but he could not even be called his pupil.... There needed nothing less than the Revolution of July and ‘L’Avenir’ to engage in a common work two natures so profoundly distinct. I saw them both for the first time: dazzled and swayed by the one, I felt myself more sweetly and more naturally drawn towards the other. If I could but paint him such as he appeared then, in all the radiance and the charm of youth! He was twenty-eight. He was dressed as a layman, the state of Paris not then permitting priests to wear their proper costume. His graceful figure, his fine and regular features, his sculpturesque forehead, the commanding carriage of his head, his dark and sparkling eye, an indescribable something of pride and elegance, as well as of modesty, in all his person—all this was but the cover of a soul which seemed ready to pour itself forth, not only in the free encounters of public speaking, but in the overflowing of affectionate intercourse. The flash of his eye disclosed gleams at once warlike and tender; it sought not only enemies to combat and to overthrow, but hearts to fascinate and conquer. His voice, already so nervous and energetic, frequently assumed accents of an infinite sweetness. Born to fight and to love, he already bore the seal of the double royalty of the soul and talent. He appeared to me charming and terrible, as a type of the enthusiasm for good—virtue armed for the support of truth. I saw in him one of the elect, predestined to all that youth adores and desires the most—genius and glory. Yet he, still more attracted by the gentle joys of Christian friendship than the distant echoes of fame, made us understand that the greatest struggles moved us only by half—that they still left us power to dream, above all, of the life of the heart—that the days began and ended according as a loved remembrance had risen or had been silent in the soul. It was he who spoke to me thus; and he added immediately, ‘Alas! we ought to love only the infinite, and this is the reason why that which we love is so complete in our soul.’ The morning after this first meeting he took me to hear his mass, which he said in the chapel of a little convent of the Visitandines in thePays Latin, and already we loved each other as men love in the pure and generous impulses of youth and under the fire of the enemy. He condescended to rejoice over that meeting which he had desired, and upon which he congratulated himself in terms which expressed his classic and democratic thought. He wrote, some time before, ‘My soul, like Iphigenia, awaits its brother at the foot of the altar.’ Afterwards, speaking of his new friend to an older one, he said, ‘I love him like a plebeian.’”
Such was the fervent young man with whom, in the year of the Revolution, in the warmth of their youth, the young Montalembert formed an everlasting friendship. They lived henceforward in a union close as that of the classic models of amity, and effusive as is natural to young Frenchmen. The two had hard enough work in hand in those brilliant, agitated, youthful days, over which M. de Montalembert lingers with a natural fondness. In the reign of utter prose which had begun, this Young France stood all glowing and poetic—believing in a new beginning as youth always believes—hoping everything grand, exalted, and generous from the new era and its own toils. They had their journal, choice vehicle of assault upon the world and all its wrongs; and from that little battery thundered, day by day, at all the injustice and oppression which came under their quick observation, taking summary vengeance upon the offenders. To-day it was a petty official, “lui, ce sous-préfet!” whom the young Abbé tossed in the air on the point of that dazzling spear of youthful scorn and beautiful indignation—to-morrow it was the new Government itself which felt the diamond point of their virgin weapons. Young ardour, daring hardihood, wild rushes at conclusions, grand assumption and display of wisdom, mixed with a thorough enjoyment and relish in the dangerous sport, shine through the tale. The young men were in the flush of youth and conscious power, exercising a censorship which somehow comes natural to youth, and which, in its brilliant impertinence and freshness of life, earns its own excuse almost from its victims. Lamennais, though not young, was of that character of genius—generous, susceptible, and wilful—which commends itself to the young, and leads without controlling them. He who, in the wild retirement of La Chenaie amid the Breton woods, made for himself a little family of the youths whom he had devoted himself to train for the service of the Church, and attached them to him with a kind of passion, seems to have exercised no subduing influence over the young men whom he associated with himself in the work of ‘L’Avenir.’ They tilted frankly at the world with an inexhaustible delight in their work. “Neither the old clergy nor the new Government were disposed to receive this new doctrine,” says M. de Montalembert, with unconscious humour, in explanation of this work; “but the violence and mistakes of the latter might be counted upon to enlighten, little by little, and bring back the former. It was necessary, then, at once to point out the arbitrary acts of certain functionaries against religion, and to teach Catholics to draw, from liberal institutions and ideas, arms which the fall of a dynasty could no more break in their hands. This was the double task to which the young Henri Lacordaire devoted his untried, and till then unknown, talent.”
Into this enterprise the young Abbé rushed with all his joyous youthful forces. Violent Radicalism and lofty High-Churchism, both the one and the other of a more fiery character than are known in our tamer atmosphere, here took hands together and defied the world. The young champion went to the wildest extremities in his vivid and rash eloquence. The French priest even, in the inspirations of his genius, antedated the equally fiery priests of Scotland, and loftily suggested to his brethren of the clergy—while discoursing to them of the sacrilege committed by a sous-préfet, who had forced an entrance into a country church for the corpse of a man who had been refused the rites of burial—an expedient which has only been adopted on the northern side of the Tweed. “You will make him grow pale” (to wit, the sous-préfet), cries the young orator, “if, taking your dishonoured God, with staff in hand and hat on head, you bear Him into some hut made with fir planks, swearing not to expose Him a second time to the insults of the State-temples.” “These words,” says Montalembert, “indicate the extreme, unjust, and dangerous conclusion from which ‘L’Avenir’ drew not back. It said to the clergy that they should be prepared to renounce thebudget du culte, sole remnant of their ancient and legitimate patrimony, sole guarantee of their material existence, to give up even the churches of which the State assumed to be owner, to enter into full possession of the invincible powers and inexhaustible resources of modern liberty.” Nor did these bold assaults end in mere words. “A series of contests,” continues the biographer, “the details of which would encumber this narrative, but which were all designed to promote the emancipation of the priests and the Catholic citizens, took him more than once to the court of thepolice correctionelle, sometimes as the accused, sometimes as client, sometimes even as advocate; for until he was interdicted by a decision of the Council of Discipline, he still retained the right to plead in that capacity; and I remember the surprise of a president of the Chamber, in discovering one day at the bar, in the robe of an advocate, the priest whose name already began to be famous.”
Into these encounters the young man entered with a certain relish and delight which sometimes amazed his friend. “I know not what attraction drew him to those combats,” says M. de Montalembert; “one would have said that he was trying the temper of his arms, and endeavouring to render his blows more sure.” “I am convinced,” he wrote, in issuing from one of his skirmishes, “that the Roman senate would not have frightened me.” And not only did he find enjoyment in the fight for itself, but occasional triumphs rewarded the young orator—triumphs of his frank and open youth over the big popular spectator that loved not the name of priest. One day, in answering anavocat du roiwho had ventured to say that the priests were the ministers of a foreign power, Lacordaire cried, “We are the ministers of one who is nowhere a stranger—of God.” Upon which the audience, “composed of that people of July so hostile to the clergy,” applauded, exclaiming, “My priest, my curé, what do you call yourself? you are a brave man!” He was not less frank nor less successful when he appeared as the defendant in a Government prosecution along with Lamennais, on account of some of the plain-speaking of the ‘Avenir’ touching an appointment of bishops. In his speech before this tribunal, Lacordaire defended himself, in his capacity of priest, with a touching simplicity and dignity. “I rise,” he says, “with a recollection that will not leave me. When the priest in former days rose amid the people, something which excited a profound love rose at the same time with him. Now, accused as I am, I know that my name of priest is mute for my defence, and I am resigned to it. The people deprived the priest of that ancient love which they bore him, when the priest deprived himself of an august part of his character—when the man of God ceased to be the man of freedom.... I never knew freedom better,” he continues, with a burst of professional enthusiasm, “than the day when I received, with the sacred unction, the right of speaking of God. The universe opened before me, and I learned that there was in man something inalienable, divine, eternally free—speech! The message of the priest was confided to me, and I was told to bear it to the ends of the world without any one having the right to seal my lips a single day of my life. I went out of the temple with these grand doctrines, and I met upon the threshold, law and bondage!” After this brilliant address, M. de Montalembert comes in with a tender touch of description—a little sketch which in a word or two makes us of the party, and reveals the entire scene in all its agitation and triumph.
“The two accused were acquitted. The verdict was not given till midnight. A numerous crowd surrounded and applauded the victors of the day. When they had dispersed we returned alone, in the darkness, along the quays. Upon the threshold of his door I saluted in him the orator, of the future. He was neither intoxicated nor overwhelmed by his triumph. I saw that for him the little vanities of success were less than nothing; but I saw him eager to spread the contagion of self-devotion and of courage, and delighted by the evidences of mutual faith and disinterested tenderness, which in young and Christian hearts burn with a purer and dearer light than all the victories.”
Generous and tender dreams! but who could refuse to believe that the young companion, more intoxicated with his triumph than himself, who wandered along those dark banks of Seine in the cool midnight, in the silence, so grateful after that day’s toil, by his side, affectionate and rejoicing, gave a dearer and more flattering homage to the young orator than all the applauding crowds? This single sentence is one of the most perfectly distinct touches of human personality and affection in the book.
These pious young revolutionaries, “young and Christian hearts,” continued for some time longer to get themselves into all kinds of trouble. From freedom of speech they proceeded to contend for freedom of teaching—constituted themselves into anagency for the defence of religious liberty—and set up, at their own hand, a free school, taught by three of themselves, in Paris. A curious scene followed. The three young teachers, of whom Lacordaire was one and Montalembert another, began their volunteer labours with twenty children to each. Next morning an officer of the university appeared to stop this irregular assembly. He addressed himself first to the children. “In the name of the law, I summon you to depart,” cried this functionary to the assembled urchins. “In the name of your parents, whose authority I have, I command you to remain,” immediately answered Lacordaire. The small citizens, doubtless charmed to be able to rebel so soon against law and government, immediately gave their shrill suffrage in his favour. “We shall remain,” cried the little rebels, with one voice. The result, of course, was, that scholars and teachers had equally to succumb to the power of the law, and that once more there ensued a trial, and brilliant appearance of the eloquent Abbé, which this time was before the Chamber of Peers, the most illustrious assemblage in France, one of the culprits, M. de Montalembert himself, being a member of that august body. We have no room to quote this speech; but the prosecution, like the former, seems to have ended in nothing.
“I will be pardoned for lingering upon the events of that year, so memorable for us,” says Montalembert, with touching grace. “There is no one, however obscure and useless may have been his life, who, at the decline of his days, does not feel himself drawn by an irresistible current towards the moment when the first fires of enthusiasm were lighted in his soul and on his lips—no one who does not breathe with a sort of intoxication the perfume of these recollections, and who is not tempted to boast beyond measure their charm and their brightness,—days at once happy and sad,” he says—“days devoured by labour and by enthusiasm—days such as occur but once in a life.”
The apology is beautiful, but it is unnecessary. Few will read the history of those young days and friends, differing so totally from ourselves, yet so entirely in accord, without feeling their hearts warm to the historian, whose own youth rises so fair before him as he writes, and of whom the world is fully advised that his maturer days have well borne out the promise of that youth.
We, too, are tempted to linger, but must not, space and time preventing. ‘L’Avenir’ came at last to a sudden check, as was inevitable. After it had affronted the clergy, the bishops, and the Government, united its own little band of retainers in such bonds as unite men “under the fire of the enemy,” and fought its way for thirteen months through all manner of prosecutions and oppositions, the daring little journal came to a close in a manner as remarkable and Quixotic as had been its career. “In announcing the suspension,” says M. de Montalembert, “we announced at the same time the departure of the three principal editors for Rome, in order to submit to the Pope the questions in controversy between us and our adversaries, promising beforehand an absolute submission to the Pontifical decision.” Strange mission of the three—two of whom only had youth to excuse them in this mad embassage—to persuade wise Rome to embroil herself, and compromise her infallibility, in the decision of questions so complicated, for the satisfaction of the editors of ‘L’Avenir!’ The two young men went lightly upon their mission, not without natural excitement in the prospect of visiting the sacred city; but matters were different with Lamennais, whose genius and lofty intention seem to have been shipwrecked by that spirit of unmaturing youthfulness, always sanguine of its own triumph, expecting everything to yield to its will, absolute and petulant, and incapable of contradiction, which is as undignified as it is unnatural in a man of mature age. The confidence which led Lacordaire and Montalembert to state their difficulties to his Holiness, and beg his decision upon them, was sufficiently romantic and high-flown. “But how explain or excuse it,” says our author, “in a distinguished priest, already mature in age, as was the Abbé de Lamennais, who was then more than fifty, and who had already lived at Rome, where the Pope had received him with the greatest distinction?” The pilgrims were received with paternal kindness and unresponsive civility. They got no reply, as was natural. Lacordaire, always prompt and clear-sighted, with a native vein of good sense and practical wisdom running through all the fiery impulses of his genius, was the first to perceive how great a mistake they had made. He remained more than two months in Rome endeavouring to reconcile Lamennais to the failure of their mission, and, for his own part, refreshing his soul in that wonderful shrine of all memories and thoughts. “I can see him still,” says his affectionate biographer, “wandering for long days among the ruins and the monuments, pausing, as overpowered, to admire, with that exquisite feeling of true beauty which never forsook him, all that Rome presents of the profound and the antique—fascinated, above all, by the tranquil and incomparable charm of her horizons; then returning to the common hearth to preach reserve, resignation, submission—in a word, reason—to M. de Lamennais.” At last the young priest announced to his fretful and rebellious senior his intention of returning to France, to await there in silence, but without remaining idle, the verdict of authority. “Silence,” said he, “is, after speech, the second power in the world.” They parted so; and although they again met after an interval, the erratic and devious career of Lamennais had no further influence worth noting upon the clear, straightforward course of his young associate. ‘L’Avenir’ and such brilliant follies were over. Life, serious and grave, now awaited the young priest and orator, whose time for trying the temper of his weapons and the steadiness of his strokes was past.
After this agitating and fruitless journey, Lacordaire returned to Paris, where he lived in seclusion, in duty, and silence, for three years. Immediately after his return the cholera broke out, and he gave himself up with grave enthusiasm to the necessities of the time, attaching himself to one of the temporary hospitals. “The prejudices against the clergy were still in full force,” says M. de Montalembert; “the authorities refused the help of the Archbishop of Paris, and priests could not show themselves in the streetsen soutane.” But the attendance of Lacordaire and a few of his more zealous brethren was tolerated. “Each day I make a little harvest for eternity,” he writes. “Most of the patients do not confess, and the priest is here only a deputy of the Church, coming timidly to seek, if there may happen to be some soul which belongs to the flock. Here and there one or two confess—others are dying without ear and without voice. I put my hand upon their forehead, and, trusting in divine mercy, I say the words of absolution. It is seldom that I go away without a feeling of satisfaction in having come.” But amid these unappreciated labours, and in the loneliness, deeper than actual solitude, of a great town, the young priest amused his lonely heart with dreams of the tranquil country and a secluded life. He thought of becoming a rural curé, and in imagination chose Franche Comté, the country of his friend. “I would bury myself in the depths of the country,” he writes again, with an effusion of visionary yet profound sadness. “I would live only for a little flock, and find all my Joy in God and in the fields. It should be manifest that I am a simple man and without ambition. Adieu, great works! adieu, fame and great name! I have known their vanity, and I desire nothing more than to live obscure and good. Some day when Montalembert shall have grown grey in the midst of ingratitude and celebrity, he will come to see upon my forehead the remains of our common youth. We shall weep together at the hearth of thepresbyterié—he will do me justice before we die. I shall bless his children.... For me, a poor Catholic priest, I shall neither have children growing up under my eyes to survive me, nor domestic hearth, nor Church brilliant with knowledge and sanctity. Born in degenerate times, I shall pass from the earth among things unworthy of the memory of man. I shall endeavour to be good, simple, pious,—hoping disinterestedly in the future, since I shall not see it—working for those who perhaps will see it—and not accusing Providence, which might weigh down with heavier evils a life which deserves so little.”
Such were the sad thoughts of the young man thus stopped short in the beginning of his career. He was not, however, permitted to leave Paris; he returned to his little convent of the Visitandines, where he lived, strengthening himself “in prayer and labour, in charity, in solitude—in a life grave, simple, unknown, truly hidden in God;” but where that sadness and wistful uneasiness which so often tries to persuade itself into contentment, by dwelling upon the advantages of solitude, betrays itself in his utterances. “How happy are they,” he writes, “who are born and die under one roof without ever having quitted it.” Then he congratulates himself on his retirement. “I have always needed solitude, if only to say how much I loved it.... My days all resemble each other. I work regularly in the morning and afternoon. I see no one, save some country ecclesiastics, who come to see me now and then. I feel with joy the solitude which encircles me—it is my element, my life. Nothing can be done but with solitude—it is my great axiom.... A man makes himself from within and not from without!” “Nevertheless,” adds the biographer, “a certain instinct of the future which awaited him combined with this passionate inclination for solitude, and disclosed itself now and then in his soul like a gleam in the night. To speak and to write, to live solitary and in study, this is my whole desire,” he wrote. “However, the future will justify me, and still more the judgment of God. A man has always his hour; he must wait for it, and do nothing contrary to Providence.”
All this was the natural language of a young and exuberant life, whose hour had not yet come, and which was fully occupied in the endeavour to content and satisfy itself in its compulsory calm. During this interval he preached his first sermon, which, after all the brilliant orations which he had made at the bar and before the public courts, was a failure. “He is a man of talent, but he will never be a preacher,” said his disappointed friends; and he acknowledged and tried to reconcile himself to the fact. “But I may one day be called to a work which requires youth, and which will be devoted solely to youth,” says the preacher, with a sigh of disappointment, yet hope. But soon the skies opened, and the work for which he longed presented itself at last.
It was as lecturer to the pupils of the College Stanislas, “the most humble in Paris,” that he recommenced in 1834 his public work. After his second lecture the chapel could not contain the crowd of hearers who joined his young auditory. At once, without any interval, he seems to have vindicated his own gifts and flashed into immediate popularity. But the shadow of ‘L’Avenir’ and all its combats was still upon him. After two winters occupied thus, the Archbishop, who was his friend, and had sanctioned his lectures, changed his mind, and forbade him to continue them. Lacordaire obeyed without a murmur. “Obedience is hard,” he wrote, “but I have learned by experience that it is sooner or later rewarded, and that God above knows what is best for us; light comes to him who submits, as to a man who opens his eyes.”
Shortly, however, his reward came. The heart of the Archbishop melted; at the repeated petition of a deputation of law students, headed by the celebrated Ozanam, he called the preacher of the College Stanislas to the pulpit of Notre Dame, to a lectureship which had been established a year before for the students of the metropolis. Here Lacordaire rose at once to the height of fame as a preacher. His genius had been maturing in the silence and disappointment of the past. Now there were no longer two opinions on the subject. The venerable walls of Notre Dame had never seen such an audience, says M. de Montalembert; and the highest applause, the applause of his gratified diocesan, crowned the triumph. The Archbishop, “who was present at all the sermons, and who for the first time since the violences of which he had been the victim after the Revolution of July, found himself in the presence of the crowd, was transported by a success which avenged him so nobly by associating him with the popularity of this new-born glory. One day, rising from his archiepiscopal throne before that immense audience, he bestowed on his young disciple the title ofthe new prophet.”
Around this new prophet a circle of young and fervent souls occupied the closest place. The Society of St Vincent de Paul, newly formed, and in all the ardour of its first love, whom the preacher apostrophised as “that chivalry of youth, purity, and brotherhood,” formed the nucleus of the congregation; and, looking back upon the image of his friend triumphant amid such a surrounding, it is not wonderful that M. de Montalembert breaks sharply off with a cry of indignation over the downfall of that admirable Society, “the most beautiful work of the nineteenth century,” as he exclaims, with natural fervour, “the most pure and spontaneous fruit of Christian democracy.” “Imagine Lacordaire in his strength, and with the liberty of the press, before such an act!” says his biographer, recalling the days of ‘L’Avenir;’ “imagine the justice which he would have done with that pen which of old had stigmatised much smaller culprits by burning invectives, the echo of which still vibrated in the pulpit of Notre Dame:Lui, ce sous-préfet!”
When he had thus reached the height of popularity, and attained the sphere of labour for which he had longed, Lacordaire stopped short in a manner which cannot fail to amaze the English reader. Here terminated the first chapter in the life of the great preacher. In the midst of his triumphant success, and of this work so congenial to his mind and satisfactory to his highest ambition, he came of his own will to a sudden pause in his career. “By one of those marvellous intuitions, of which he had more than any one else the secret, he recognised,” says M. de Montalembert, “that self-examination, labour, silence, and solitude were still necessary to him.” He paused at the height of his triumph. “I leave in the hands of my bishop this pulpit of Notre Dame, founded by him and by you, by the pastor and by the people. This double suffrage has shone for a moment on my head; suffer me to remove it, and to find myself again alone for a time with my weakness and my God.” With these words he concluded his second Lent in 1836. “After he had left the pulpit, he declined, notwithstanding the repeated entreaties of the Archbishop, to re-enter it, and departed for Rome.”
No outward circumstances accounted for this sudden pause. It was an internal need to which he responded by such a simple and actual withdrawal from life as seems unprovided for, even in the conceptions of Protestant piety. The spirit of Lacordaire, says one of his closest companions, his maternal friend, Madam Swetchine, required only the power of “subduing and containing itself in obscurity,” to become sublime; a great and general necessity of all others the least easily attainable. To accomplish such a victory over ourselves, we, in our heretical pride of reason and self-command, have no external aids. What we can do towards this greatest of conquests we must do under the cover of ordinary circumstances and labour, and few and happy are the men who do not find this perennial conflict recur in their disengaged moments all through their lives. But the Catholic Church has ordained a system of helps and stimulants in the great work of ruling their own spirit, which is harder to most men than taking cities. When the young Father Lacordaire felt the reins gliding out of his hands, in whatever way that occurred—for we have no information on the subject—the expedient of flight suggested itself to him, as it would have been very unlikely to do to an Englishman in similar circumstances. The Catholic priest thought it no shame to acknowledge to himself that his spirit stood in need of discipline. All the saints and holy men of his Church had at some period of their lives fled from the attractions of the world, and used sharp methods of subduing the flesh, which they did not hesitate to acknowledge was too strong for them. Lacordaire, too, withdrew to get the mastery of his own spirit. This was his object in going to Rome. He was in the height of manhood, thirty-four years old—the very noon of life. He was no superstitious or visionary priest, but a man already versed in the ways of the world, who had acquitted himself with intuitive good sense in more than one difficult crisis. He had passed through scepticism, through criticism, to that dutiful and steadfast faith which knew both how to reason and how to obey. He was not disappointed or unfortunate, but, on the contrary, glowing with success and triumph of the kind most gratifying to such a man. He was not even of an archæological type of mind, nor romantically prejudiced in favour of the antique institutions of Christendom; he was a liberal, a man of his day, an educated modern mind—able, surely, if ever priest or Catholic was, to form his opinion freely. He had arrested himself by his own will in a career abundantly flattering to all his tastes and vanities, and now stood thoughtful in the mid-current of his life to determine how he should best perfect and utilise that existence still in its highest force and power. Wandering about Rome, among its monuments and relics, praying to God, as he himself says, in its basilicas, he pondered this great question. Nowhere could have been found a fitter scene. Amid the ruins of many a grand ambition, over the traces engraven in the earth by many a haughty and undisciplined spirit, the thoughtful priest wandered, meditating the highest uses of his own life. His thoughts came to a conclusion which, to our eyes, seems the most inconceivable and astonishing ever made by man. He decided upon becoming a monk. Aware by many a mortifying experience that the very name of priest was still suspected and disliked in his own country, where all his power and influence lay, this man, so sensible, so moderate, so dutiful, whose genius had not made him eccentric, and whose sympathies were all with his own age, decided that the best thing he could do for France and the glory of God was to clothe his own vigorous life and personality in the obsolete dress of the cloister. It was not the cloistered indolence of an Italian convent to which he looked forward. In the strength of his life and genius he felt no need of that repose, which would but have chafed him. Eager for work, conscious of his own powers, devoted to his own country, and seeking to qualify himself for renewed and advancing labour, this was the decision to which Lacordaire came; a decision altogether inexplicable and amazing, which we are unable to account for at this distance, much less to explain.
Nor was this resolution adopted by any capricious impulse, or in any flash of imaginative ardour. It was a conclusion obtained not without pain and resistance of the flesh. “I persuaded myself then,” he explains, in one of his latest productions, quoted by M. de Montalembert, “while wandering about Rome, and praying God in its basilicas, that the greatest service which could be rendered to Christendom in the times in which we live, was to do something for the restoration of the religious orders. But this persuasion, though it was for me the very light of the Gospel, left me undecided and trembling, when I came to consider how unfit I was for such a great work. My faith, thank God, was profound. I loved Jesus Christ and His Church above everything created. I had loved glory before I loved God, but nothing else. Besides, in descending into myself, I found nothing there which seemed to me to answer to the idea of a founder or even restorer of an order. When I contemplated these Colossi of Christian strength and piety my soul fell under me, like a horseman under his horse—I was struck to the ground discouraged and wounded. The mere idea of sacrificing my liberty to a rule and to superiors overwhelmed me. The son of an age which scarcely knew how to obey, independence had been my couch and my guide. How could I transform myself suddenly into a docile heart, and henceforward trust only in submission for the light of my conduct?” The question was hard to answer. Of all men the young editor of ‘L’Avenir’ might have seemed the least likely to attain such a height of virtue; but from this difficulty he escapes, after much further self-argument, by the following conclusion:—
“I encouraged myself by these thoughts, and it occurred to me that all my previous life, and even my faults, had prepared for me a certain access to the heart of my country and my time. I asked myself if I should not be guilty if I neglected these openings by a timidity which was good for nothing but repose, and if the greatness even of the sacrifice was not a reason for attempting it?... Urged by the situation, and solicited by a grace stronger than myself, I at last made up my mind; but the sacrifice was terrible. It had not cost me nothing to leave the world for the priesthood, but it cost me everything to add to the priesthood the burden of monastic life. However, in the second case as in the first, as soon as I had consented to it I knew neither weakness nor repentance, and went forward courageously to meet the trials which awaited me.”
It is not difficult to recognise in this second great decision of his life the same prompt and steadfast spirit which, having convinced the young advocate of the nothingness of irreligion, bore him at once, without pause or lingering, into the service of that faith in which therewassomething, a power owned by all human hearts. It is the same principle which again moves him. Common means and modes of working this power have been sadly unsuccessful of recent years. What is this grand, unused, obsolete instrument, the traces of which are marked all over that Roman soil among the vines and the ruins? Who can tell if perhapsthat, restored to efficient working, and new-tempered and polished, might accomplish, as of old, those prodigies of labour and service, for which the usual tools seem no longer practicable? As soon as he settles in his mind the undoubted duty of trying this forgotten weapon, and restoring it to the armoury of the Church, no further pause is necessary. In the height of his fame and strength, the great preacher returns upon the new preparations and training necessary for his new life. He disappears into “the depths of an Italian cloister” for his novitiate, assured that he is thus doing his highest duty to God and his country. “I believe that this act is thedénouementof my life—the result of all that God has done before—the secret of His graces, of my trials and experiences,” he writes. “I am like a man who has gained some credit, and who can apply it to some useful and generous work. Without the past I could do nothing; by continuing only the past, it would be a life of which the effect was not proportioned to the grace which God has given me.” This was the strange result of his retirement and pondering. In Notre Dame, amid the throng of impressed and admiring hearers, the preacher felt that he was not doing enough, nor making sufficient use of God’s gifts. A noble discontent had seized him—he had to make better usury yet, and greater, of his talent. To see him, after all his questioning, disappear into that Italian cloister, is to us the strangest anticlimax—the most wonderful apparent contradiction; but it was the calm conclusion of his mind—a mind ripe and well able to judge, unimpassioned and sensible. We do not attempt to offer any explanation of the act, nor do we profess ourselves competent to understand the convictions that led to it; but strange as it is, here is the fact, let us draw what conclusions we will. According to Lacordaire’s deliberate and thoughtful decision, he could serve God best as a monk, and a monk accordingly he became.
Five years afterwards he reappeared in the pulpit of Notre Dame, “with his shaven head and his white tunic.” He preached with his usual eloquence uponLa Vocation de la Nation Française, and spoke only in passing of his own monastic vocation. He made but one appearance, contenting himself apparently with “inaugurating in France,” as M. de Montalembert says, “the monastic frock, which she had not seen for fifty years.” He disappeared from Paris after this for two years more, dividing his time between the Italian cloister and the southern provinces of France, until in 1843 a new war began to rage in the French world, on that old question of liberty of teaching, for which the young ‘L’Avenir,’ years ago, had fought so stoutly, and for which its editors had made their appearance at the bar of the Chamber of Peers. Under the influence of this strife, and just as the Government awoke to alarm, and began to regard with apprehension the appearance of the Dominican frock in the pulpit and in the streets, the new Archbishop invited Lacordaire to resume his lectureship in Notre Dame. The Frère Prêcheur took his place again in the metropolitan pulpit: it was at once a defiance of the alarmed Government, and a re-proclamation of those principles of religious liberty on which the preacher had long ago taken his stand. For this question “de la liberté d’enseignement” involved also the question of liberty of association, the power of forming communities—a power nominally accorded to the French nation by its charter, but which had never been actually granted to it. The Church, wise as a serpent, seized upon this public right. She, too, had bethought herself of the long disused and valuable instrument of monasticism. Without monks no thorough hold could be got upon popular educational institutions; but without the power of forming corporations and organising bodies of men, the invasion of a new race of monks was impossible. On the other hand, alarmed statesmen and the public in general foresaw, with this power in the hands of the Church, an immediate inroad of the dreaded Jesuit and his brethren, to lay insidious hold upon the education of the people. “While the bishops and Catholic publicists,” says M. de Montalembert, “claimed the liberty promised by the charter with all its consequences, the numerous orators and writers of the University party defended its monopoly, and made use especially against the Jesuits of that unpopularity which the heirs of the perverse doctrines and cruel persecutions of the eighteenth century could everywhere re-awaken against the religious orders.We owe them nothing but expulsion!this cry of a deputy too famous for his interruptions, seemed to the world of so-called liberals the best response to the claims raised for religious associations in the name of liberty and equality.” The Church mustered her forces gallantly, and went into the conflict with might and main. With cunning boldness she placed two of the feared and suspected monks in the pulpit of Notre Dame—Lacordaire, in his white Dominican robe, and the Jesuit De Ravignan—to fire between them the new-born enthusiasm of French Catholics, and show what voices were these which the timidity of the State and the prejudices of the vulgar would banish from France. Into that pulpit politics did not enter—but an instrument more efficacious was there. “Lacordaire did not himself enter into the controversy,” says M. de Montalembert, “and not the least allusion to it is to be found in all his discourses.... But the universal popularity of his preaching, the immense audiences which everywhere collected around the pulpit in which he appeared, were arguments much more eloquent than discussions of politics or public law. It sufficed him to establish his victory by preaching in Paris and throughout France, and by assuming the right of living in a community, and attiring himself as he pleased, which no one dared to contest with him, in the different places where he lived with his brethren.” Such was the unquestionably potent line of argument set up by the Gallican Church. Here was the greatest preacher of the age, a man pure and pious, incapable of self-aggrandisement, full of ardour for God’s service, known to have hazarded his life in hospital and public pestilence, a champion of popular liberty, altogether of spotless reputation and well-deserved fame; was the order to which such a man belonged, by free will and choice, to be feared and banished? were such as he to be interrupted in their great work because they preferred to wear a certain garb and conform to certain rules? No, in the name of liberty! A more effective plea could scarcely be imagined. Lacordaire’s colleague, the Père de Ravignan, claimed for himself, as M. de Montalembert tells us, “as a citizen, and in the name of the charter, and of the liberty of conscience guaranteed to all, the right of being and of calling himself a Jesuit.” But the Frère Prêcheur does not seem to have done even so much as this. Never abandoning the idea for which others were now fighting as he had once fought, he devoted himself to his duties in the midst of the strife—made his monkish frock splendid with the eloquence of a voice worthy the old renown of the French pulpit—made it familiar to all eyes as he travelled through the country collecting crowds of eager hearers everywhere; finally, with quiet resolution, established here and there, in different quarters, houses of his order, assuming for himself, in the strength of his character and fame, the very right for which his colleagues were struggling, and giving calm intimation, as he did so, that he would defend this right, if attacked, before the tribunals of his country. Nobody ventured to attack Lacordaire. The white Dominican went all over France, leaving behind him here and there a little nucleus of monks. Public opinion melted before the great preacher. If men’s minds did not change, at least their opposition was hushed and put down by the unquestionable eminence of the man. “Henceforward,” he himself says, “in all the pulpits, and upon all the roads of France, the monastic robe has recovered the right of citizenship which it lost in 1790.” He restored the credit of the monks, and gained a certain degree of toleration for the Jesuits themselves, and thus won what is in the eyes of M. de Montalembert “the great victory which shall immortalise his name.”
This struggle, which Lacordaire himself calls “the most perilous and the most decisive of all his campaigns,” was brought to a conclusion by the renewed political agitations of 1848. In that strange hubbub and overthrow of existing affairs, the tide of public commotion, by way of demonstrating the hold he had obtained on the public mind, drew the monk from his retirement to plunge him into the newly-formed Assembly of France. His appearance there did not, in the excitement of the time, shock the sensibilities of any; his election even “charmed and reassured all religious men;” and the preacher himself was sufficiently sanguine to believe that the mild Lamartine sway was to maintain the constitution of France, and that great charter for which he had fought so long, and to introduce a new era in the history of the nation. He obeyed the voice of the people, like other great Elects, and took his seat always in his Dominican frock in the revolutionary parliament—and he assisted in founding another paper, ‘L’Ere Nouvelle,’ which was neither so long-lived nor so brilliant as ‘L’Avenir’ of his youth. But the natural good sense of the man shortly interposed. His parliamentary career lasted but ten days, and erelong he retired also from the newspaper, and withdrew to one of his new convents to recover himself and throw off the excitement of this renewed essay at politics. Then having shaken himself free of this interruption, he went back to his beloved pulpit, where he preached and laboured as before for three years. But in April 1851, when concluding his lectures, he took an unlooked-for and unintended farewell—some subtle shadow of coming events, which, however, he denies to be a presentiment, having moved him to special tenderness and pathos—of the pulpit in which, more or less, he had laboured for twenty years. “Oh, walls of Notre Dame! sacred arches which have borne my words to so many intelligences deprived of God! altars which have blessed me! I will never separate from you!” he cries, his heart moving within him as he recalls his past life, and all that has happened there, since, young and in the dawn of his fame, he made his first appearance in the metropolitan church. But he never again entered the pulpit thus endeared by the labours of a life; once more only he preached in Paris, and once again, in 1854, delivered, at the request of the Archbishop, six discourses in Toulouse. His career as a preacher had come to an abrupt and unexpected conclusion: for in the mean time that virtuous republic, which Lamartine and his brethren had begun so mildly, had fallen into desperate troubles, and the sharp and sudden stroke of thecoup d’étathad shocked society in France into a new mood. Freedom of speech, eloquence itself, went suddenly out of fashion. Silence was best when there was so little to say that could be anyhow consolatory to the people or satisfactory to the ruler. With a delicate but indignant reticence, M. de Montalembert indicates thus the reason of his friend’s sudden withdrawal from the pulpit:—
“I do not think that any formal interdiction emanating even from the temporal authorities had ever been pronounced against him; but there was a general sentiment that this bold and free language which he had used for twenty years, under all changes, without meeting any obstacle, without recognising any curb but that of orthodoxy, was now out of date. Evil days had come for the struggles and the triumphs of eloquence. It was universally repudiated, and made responsible for all the misfortunes of the country, for all the dangers of society, by a triumphant revenge of those who had never been able to make any man listen to them. The prince of sacred eloquence had thus to be silent. He said afterwards, ‘I left the pulpit in a spontaneous fear of my liberty before an age which was no longer free. I perceive,’ he added, ‘that in my thoughts, in my language, in my past, in what remains to me of future, I also was a kind of freedom, and that my hour had come to disappear like the others.’”
He preached no more. He was not yet fifty—still in the full vigour of his powers—but the day of discussion, of agitation, of eloquence was over, and Lacordaire, with instinctive wisdom, seems to have perceived the expediency of submission. It is a strange conclusion to a singular career. After the chivalrous pugnacity of his earlier years; after his steady struggle all his life through, by every possible means to link together democracy and Catholicism, the old unmoving Church and the new ever-varying world; after ‘L’Avenir’ of his youth, with its daring hopes and efforts—the brilliant youthful future which he and his colleagues were to work out of revolution and anarchy—and ‘L’Ere Nouvelle’ of his later years, which had less of the future, less of hope, yet was still a new beginning;—it is a strange sight to see the champion suddenly drop his arms and stand silent, arrested for ever before this new, strange, silent figure of absolutism which has suddenly erected itself against the agitated firmament. When this unlooked-for apparition rises between him and the skies, the great preacher has nothing more to say. All is over in a moment. “I have never feared but one thing—the absolute triumph of an individual,” said his friend, Madame Swetchine. And when, at last, after a world of controversy and discussion, that dreaded event arrived, the public life of the great orator came to an almost instantaneous conclusion. He retired not by compulsion, but by some internal sense of necessity. “He had no violence, no persecution to complain of,” says his biographer, “and I only render homage to truth by declaring that I have never seen in him the least trace of bitterness or of animosity against the new power. This power inspired him only with the sentiment of neutrality, dignified and a little disdainful, which existed in his nature in respect to all powers.” But whatever his sentiment might be, the fact is certain. Before all other developments of power the orator had held up bravely the banner of the Church, and kept his place. Before this new potency he gave way and yielded. It is one of the strangest acts of homage ever done to an unquestionable strength—“Le prince de la parole sacrée dût donc se taire.” He gave up that right over which he had rejoiced in the fervent days of his youth as “something inalienable, divine, eternally free”—the right of speaking of God. He made neither resistance nor public protest. The shadow of the new Empire fell over him in sudden chill and silence, and the words died upon his fervid lips. He who had spoken so freely, laboured so hard, spent himself so liberally for the service of his Church and country, was in himself, as he expresses it, “a kind of liberty”—a personified freedom; and, as with other freedoms, the day was over for him. He saw by intuition that resistance was useless. The silent despot overawed, as by a species of fascination, the eloquent priest, who, in his heart, was “a little disdainful” of all kinds of powers. This new kind of power, personal, self-concentrated, standing alone in an inexorable mute mystery over the destinies of France, silenced the preacher as if by force of instinct. His voice died out of the country, which had fallen into a sudden paralysis, half of fear, half of admiration, before this basilisk Emperor. The spell was upon Lacordaire as upon France. He never opened his lips again in public after that one series of provincial lectures, which were themselves broken off and left imperfect, because one of them contained “some outbursts of truth, of grief, and of boldness, which were no longer in season. He had to renounce public speaking definitively,” says M. de Montalembert, with significant reserve; and here, according with the beginning of the imperial power, ended his public life.
He withdrew after this to Soraye, an ancient abbey, first of the Benedictines, then of the Dominicans, to which order he himself belonged, and where there now flourished a large public school. He devoted himself to the regeneration and perfection of this institution, to “the teaching of youth, which had always been the supreme vocation of his life.” Here he consoled the sadness and disappointment of his heart, wounded as it was by the sudden overthrow of all the work of his life, and by the sad and rapid change of affairs which had taken place in France, among the children whom he loved. But though he made no public complaint, and manfully devoted himself to the favourite occupation which Providence had still left to him, the lamentable downfall of all his hopes went to the heart of the liberal monk. His country, his age, “which scarcely knew how to obey,” had become all at once eager “not only to accept but to implore a master.” His Church and religious party, “clergy and Catholics, who had so long applauded the masculine independence of his eloquence, had fallen all at once a prey to a delusion without excuse, and to a prostration without example in all the history of the Church. Names which had been honoured to appear beside his own in the memorable manifestoes by which Christian liberty had invoked the sole shelter of public freedom, appeared all at once affixed to harangues and mandiments which borrowed the forms of Byzantine adulation to salute the mad dream of an orthodox absolutism.” “Till the last day of his life,” adds M. de Montalembert, “the grief and indignation with which the sight of this great moral catastrophe inspired him was not weakened. But his affliction, his magnanimous wrath, breathed forth in his letters. This treasure remains to us, thank God! it will be preserved for posterity; and when the time shall come when all may be said, it will appear as the most brilliant and most necessary of protests against those who have so miserably divided, disarmed, and discredited Catholicism in France.”
We have no space to quote, as the biographer does, those melancholy and indignant letters. Whilst thus breathing forth to his friends the disappointment which consumed his soul, Lacordaire lived on in his southern seminary, far from the busy world which had deceived him, a life of usefulness and silence. It was a “retreat laborious and animated” in which he now found himself; and, with a true Christian philosophy, the great orator bent all his faculties to his work. “One of the consolations of my present life,” he writes, with touching sadness, “is to live only with God and children: the latter have their faults, but they have still betrayed nothing and dishonoured nothing.” He made Soraye “the most flourishing and popular scholastic establishment in the south;” he formed a tender paternal friendship with many young souls, over whom he had immense influence. With the same eloquence which he had displayed in Notre Dame he preached to his pupils in their provincial chapel. In short, he accepted his position like a true man; and, hiding his mortification, his profound disappointment, his injured heart in his own breast, devoted himself to the important but obscure position in which he was to end his life. Here another great event happened to him in his seclusion. It was from Soraye he came, in his Dominican frock, to receive from the French Academy “the noblest recompense which can, in our days, crown a glorious and independent life.” He sat one day only in that illustrious assembly, where he appeared, as he himself said, as “the symbol of freedom accepted and fortified by religion.” This last honour was the last public event which occurred in his life. He went back laureated for his dying, and ended his life in Soraye, after a painful illness—so far as we are able to make out, for M. de Montalembert is indistinct in the matter of dates—in the winter of 1861. “It is the first time that my body has resisted my will,” he said, with a half-playful melancholy, in the midst of his sufferings; and died exclaiming, “My God, open to me, open to me!” with a sublime simplicity. God opened to him, and his agitations were over. Whether on the other side of that wonderful gateway he might discover that his monkish frock was less worth fighting for than it appeared, who can inquire? He lived a life full of worthy labour and service, and doubtless found his reward.
Our space does not permit us to follow M. de Montalembert, in his quotations from the letters and sermons of his friend, though there are in these letters many snatches of brilliant and tender eloquence on which we are much tempted to linger. It is not, however, in his productions that Lacordaire is most remarkable; it is in his character and career. “The principal thing isto have a life,” he himself said, when deprecating the over-production of modern literature; and no man has more exemplified the saying. He had a life, this man of conflict and strife, of self-denial and silence, of independence and duty—a life too human to make any formal anatomical consistency over-visible in its flesh-and-blood details—broadly contradictory, yet always in a harmony with itself more true than consistency. With his heart full of the agitations and the hopes of his time, he lived in his cloister in the practice of self-mortifications and punishments as severe as those with which any antique son of Dominic had subdued the flesh. “When all the events of this generous life shall be known, the orator will disappear before the monk,” says his sympathetic and admiring biographer, “and theprestigeof that eloquence which has moved, enlightened, and converted so many souls, will seem a less marvel than the formidable austerity of his life, the severity with which he chastised his flesh, and his passionate love for Jesus Christ.” This is the side of his character and existence least comprehensible to the English spectator. How he, so unimpassioned, so temperate, so sensible—he who had only loved glory, and nothing else, before he loved God—should have needed “excessive macerations” to subdue that flesh which, so far as appears, was far from exercising any despotic sway over the spirit, is a curious question, and one which perhaps never can be answered to the satisfaction of our practical understandings; but the interest, the individuality, and sincere nobleness of his life seem unquestionable. From his little convent he passes to the bar and public tribunal, where even the unwilling crowd applauds; to the pulpit, where admiring multitudes surround him; yet returns to his Visitandines and his almonry, obedient and silent, when the hour of his triumph is over. From the height of popular fame and success, driven by that noble intuition in his heart that he is not sufficiently using the talent God has given him, he withdraws to take up the monk’s frock, most despised of habits, not to hide a mortified life or wounded heart, as a sentimental bystander might suppose, but for the sake of the labour and use of which he believes it still capable. Deeply contradictory as such a proceeding is of all our convictions and theories, it is far from our thoughts to blame Lacordaire for this singular vestment in which he enwrapped all his later life. It may be that to the eyes of this languid and over-refining age, the forcible type and symbol which antedate all arguments is, after all, the thing most wanted; and that the apparition of the monk, self-denuded of all possessions, even of his own will, for the glory of God and the service of his neighbour, may startle the confused intelligence into a belief of that work and its importance, which no philosophy could give. Such at least seems to have been the conviction of Lacordaire. Like his great contemporary Irving, the French preacher felt the inefficacy of common means for the work on which his heart was set. To both the world came open-mouthed, wondering and admiring; but neither in the London modern church, nor under the noble arches of Notre Dame, was the report of the prophet believed as he felt in his heart it ought to be. This uneasiness in the passionate heart of our great countryman gave rise, by some subtle magnetic influence, to a wild dream of miraculous aid and voices from heaven; and in the self-controlled and unimpassioned soul of the French priest it wrought an issue almost as strange—the restoration, to some extent, of monasticism in his country, and the dedication of his own life to that disused and discredited vocation. No two men could be more unlike, but here both met in a strange concord and agreement. Something had to be done beyond the ordinary routine of evangelism to seize upon the dull ear and sluggish heart of the time. Supernaturalism, or monasticism, or any other martyrdom—what matter, so it did but startle that slumbering generation to some thought of its evil ways? Let us build the sepulchres of those prophets whom our fathers, by their apathy and indifference, drove into such a noble desperation. We too, doubtless, will do our share of the same work. Yet it is a kind of penitence of humanity for its ever-recurring mistakes and misconceptions, which prompts one generation to decorate the tombs into which the sins of a former generation have urged and driven the not perfect yet noble dead.