CHAPTER VIIIVINET AND SAINTE-BEUVE—JUSTE OLIVIER

A STREET IN ST. SAPHORIN

Nor have the Swiss ever made any notable contribution to original philosophic thought. Their principal metaphysicians, like Charles Bonnet, have been merely theologians in disguise, who have started by assuming the points which they undertook to prove, and have been unable to keep their metaphysics and their theology apart, as did, for example, Bishop Berkeley and Dean Mansell. The great names in the history of speculative thought—such names as those of Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Green—have been English, or German, or French, or Dutch. One does not find a single Swiss name among them. The great Swiss names, when we get away from theology, all stand for something scientific, practical, concrete. Lavater, Gesner, Saussure, Jomini—such are a few of the instances that may be cited to point our moral and lead us up to our generalization, which is as follows:

Elementary education is excellent in Switzerland; but the higher education is too technical and utilitarian to satisfy those who consider that the function of education is to cultivate the mind. The elementary schools of the Canton of Vaud are probably better than those of the County of London; but the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne area poor substitute for those of Oxford and Cambridge.

Let us by all means give praise where praise is due. The Medical Faculties of Berne and Lausanne have a European reputation; and it is said that engineering is nowhere taught better than at the Zurich Polytechnic. The practical side of the Swiss character is also well exemplified in the various schools for waiters, for watch-makers, and for bee-keepers. But it is possible—or it seems so to an English University man—for education to be too practical; and the Swiss have surely committed that excess in devising that educational abomination, the School of Commerce. Nothing is ever taught in a School of Commerce that a man who has been properly educated elsewhere cannot pick up in six weeks; and the curriculum, though it may sharpen the wits, can only, at the best, produce a superior kind of bagman.

Swiss education, therefore, has its drawbacks even for a Switzer; and, for a young Englishman of the better class, it has other drawbacks in addition. It is not merely that he learns less than he would in England because an unfamiliar language is the medium of instruction. He also acquires the wrong tone and the wrong manner, misses opportunitiesof making useful friends, and finds himself, when he grows up, a stranger in his own country—a stranger not only to the people, but to the ways and modes of thought. That is a disadvantage which was pointed out as long ago as the eighteenth century, by Dr. John Moore, when a nobleman who had thought of sending his son to the University of Geneva asked his advice on the subject. 'The boy would return,' said the doctor, 'a kind of a Frenchman, and would so be disqualified for success in English life.'

The same criticism still applies. We are better cosmopolitans nowadays than were Dr. Moore's contemporaries, but the differences between the nations still subsist; and, just as each nation has the system of education which it deserves, so it has the system of education which best prepares a man to fight the battle of life in his own country. In England, more than in any other country, success depends comparatively little upon book-learning, and very much upon character and the possession of certain qualities which, in our insular pride, we vaunt as specially 'British.' These qualities are not to be acquired in the Swiss schools. The qualities that are to be acquired there may, in some respects, be better and more solid; but theyare not so useful in Great Britain. An English boy educated in a Swiss school is, as a rule, when he leaves, rather a clumsy lout, with a smattering of bad French, emancipated from certain prejudices which might be useful to him, but steeped in other prejudices which are likely to stand in his way. One always has the feeling that more might have been made of him at home: not merely at Eton or Harrow, but at Clifton or Marlborough, or even at St. Paul's or the Bedford Grammar School.

On the whole, therefore, the educationalraison d'êtreof the English colony at Lausanne disappears under investigation—at any rate, so far as the boys are concerned. The girls, from a certain point of view, may be better off there; for the Swiss girls' schools are good, and the snobbishness which is the vice of English girls' schools is discouraged in them. For the girls, difficulties only arise when they reach a marriageable age. There are no husbands for them at Lausanne, or anywhere in Switzerland, unless it be at Montreux, where Anglo-Indians sometimes come on leave, since all the men whom they meet—one is speaking only of their own countrymen—are either too young or too old—mere students, or else superannuated veterans. They know it, and lament their lot aloud; andthe Swiss know it, too, and make remarks. The English colony at Lausanne, they say, isune vraie pépinière de vieilles filles.

But this is an excursus. We must return to Lausanne, and take another look at its social and intellectual life.

THE DENTS DU MIDI AND LA TOUR FROM "ENTRE DEUX VILLES"

The centre of the intellectual life was always the University. It could not be otherwise in a country in which every man is born a pedagogue. In England the view has come to prevail that literature only begins to be vital when it ceases to be academic. In the Canton of Vaud the literature is academic or nothing, and even the poets are professors, unbending in their hours of sentimental ease; while the literature of revolt is the bitter cry of professors who have forfeited their chairs on account of their religious or political opinions. As the result of each revolution in turn we see a company of professors put to flight. The casualties of that sort are at least as numerous as the broken heads.

The detailed relation of such professorial vicissitudes belongs, however, to the native antiquary. Here it will suffice to recall a few more notable names.

A Swiss historian would doubtless say that thegreatest of the names is that of Alexandre Vinet. In his hot youth he wrote riotous poetry:

'O mes amis, vidons bouteilleEt laissons faire le destin.Le Dieu qui préside à la treilleEst notre unique souverain.'

Afterwards he became austere, and played a great part in theological controversy. He hated the Revivalists, whom he described as 'lunatics at large'; but he insisted that religious liberty should be the heritage of all, and, while opposing established churches, exercised a profound spiritual influence. He was a great Broad Churchman, and we may class him as the F. W. Robertson or F. D. Maurice of the Canton of Vaud. Sainte-Beuve blew his trumpet, and he, on his part, almost persuaded Sainte-Beuve to become a Protestant.

Sainte-Beuve, it is hardly too much to say, came to Lausanne in search of a religion. St. Simonism had disappointed him, and so had the Liberal Catholicism of Lamennais. Lamennais, in fact, had gone too fast and too far for him—had, as it were, he said, taken him for a drive, and spilt him in a ditch, and left him there and driven on. None the less, he earnestly desired to be spiritually-mindedand a devout believer, feeling, in particular, an inclination towards mysticism, though unable to profess himself a mystic. 'I have,' he wrote to a friend, 'the sense of these things, but not the things themselves.' It seemed to him that he might find 'the things themselves' at Lausanne, if he went there in the proper spirit and sat at Vinet's feet.

His Swiss friend, Juste Olivier, a professor who was also a poet, procured him an engagement to deliver a course of lectures at the Lausanne Academy,[8]and he embarked upon his errand with as much humility as was compatible with professorship. Left free to choose his own subject, he decided to treat of Port Royal and the Jansenists—the most spiritually-minded of the Catholics, and those who had the closest affinity with the Protestants. By means of his lectures he thought to build himself a bridge by which to pass from the one camp to the other.

His elocution was defective, and his lectures were not quite such a success as he could have wished. The students used to meet in the cafés to parody them in the evenings. On the other hand, however, serious people eagerly watched thedevelopments of the spiritual drama. Not only did it seem to them that the fate of a soul was in the balance—they were also hoping to see Protestantism score the sort of triumph that would make a noise in Paris. So they asked daily for news of Sainte-Beuve, as of a sick man lying at death's door, and asked Vinet, whom they regarded as his spiritual physician, to issue a bulletin. And Vinet's bulletin was to this effect: 'I think he is convinced, but not yet converted.' But Vinet, as he was soon to discover, was only partly right.

That Sainte-Beuve was not converted was, indeed, obvious enough, seeing that he was making violent love to his neighbour's wife at the time—between him and 'conversion' stood the obstructive charms of Madame Olivier. But it is equally true that he was not convinced; and, by a crowning irony, he found his faith evaporating as he got to close quarters with the subject, through the study of which he had expected to achieve conviction. The great history of Port Royal, begun by a believer, was finished by a sceptic. 'Moral bankruptcy,' is M. Michaut's description of his condition, and there is a sense in which it might be applied even by those who desire to dissociate morality from creeds. It was the end—at any rate, forSainte-Beuve—of all emotion which was not either purely sensual or purely intellectual. He could not be a mystic, as he could not be a poet, because he lacked the necessary genius; and forms of religion which depended, not on intuition, but on authority, were repugnant to his sane intelligence. So he said a sad farewell to Christianity, and sought no substitute. 'I am mournfully looking on at the death of my heart,' he wrote to Vinet; and he went away and resigned himself to become a materialist, a voluptuary, and a critic.

And now a word about that Juste Olivier to whom Sainte-Beuve owed his appointment, and to whose wife Sainte-Beuve made love. The poet and the critic had met at Paris, where Olivier had gone to prepare himself for the Chair of Literature at Neuchâtel. He was promoted, three years later, to the Chair of History at Lausanne, which he occupied for twelve years, acting also, during part of the time, as editor of theRevue Suisse, to which Sainte-Beuve contributed. The Revolution of 1845 unseated him. He went to Paris, where he achieved no great success, and was homesick there for five-and-twenty years. The Swiss forgot him, and the Parisians did not understand him. But, in 1870, when there was no longer a living to bemade in Paris, he came home again. One may quote the pathetic picture of his home-coming, drawn by M. Philippe Godet:

'He had to live. For three winters the poet travelled through French Switzerland, lecturing, reading his verses, relating his reminiscences, with that melancholy humour which gave his speech its charm. The public—I speak of what I saw—was polite, respectful, and nothing more. Olivier felt almost a stranger in his own country. But he consoled himself, in the summer, at Gryon, "the high village facing the Alps of Vaud," which he has so often celebrated. He was to sing, at the mid-August fête, his song to the Shepherds of Anzeindaz. And there they understood him and applauded. He had his day of happiness and glory among these simple mountaineers. He was, for an hour, what it had been the dream of his life to be, the national singer of the Vaudois country.'

But the end is melancholy. He died in a chalet at Gryon in January, 1876, a broken and disappointed man, reluctant even to speak of his work or hear it spoken of. There is a deep pathos in one of his last letters which M. Godet quotes:

'It is a melancholy history—that of our country. It did nothing for Viret or Vinet; and, though Ido not rank myself with them, I too know what neglect means. "Come and have a drink"—that is their last word here. I had hoped for better things. What a beautiful dream it was! At least I have been loyal to it, even if I have not, as I fancy, done all that it was in me to do. Since the day when, in one of my first printed poems, I wrote, "Un génie est caché dans tous les lieux que j'aime," I have obstinately sought out that genius, and tried to make it speak. It has answered me, I think more often than its voice has been heard.'

LUTRY

Lausanne, for the purposes of this volume, must be taken to include such neighbouring lake-side towns as Morges, and Rolle, and Nyon. Morges we have already seen distinguishing itself by refusing, on principle, to pay for the mending of the roads, and so paving the way for the subsequent insurrection. Nowadays it is the seat of an arsenal, and is said to have an aristocratic population, interested in literature. Rolle was the home of the Laharpes, and boasts a statue of César de Laharpe by Pradier. A colony of French and Genevan political exiles once flourished there, and Madame de Staël was a frequent visitor. Voltaire once proposed to buy an estate in the neighbourhood—the Château des Menthon—but the Bernese would not let him do so, alleging the curious reason that the philosopher was a Roman Catholic. Nyon is the dirtiest town on the Lake—or would be if Villeneuve were not dirtier. But it is also one of the most picturesque—thecastle being nobly situated and in a fine state of preservation—and it has its interesting memories.

One of its interesting associations is with the Waldenses. These persecuted Protestants had fled, or been driven out, from their mountain home above Turin. Switzerland received them hospitably, but they were homesick. They resolved to go back; not to slink back in twos and threes, but to march back, with their flags flying, like courageous Christian soldiers. They mustered at Nyon, and thence crossed the lake under the leadership of the fighting pastor, Henri Arnaud, and marched across the mountains to effect their 'glorious re-entry.' It was a great military feat, and no less a judge than Napoleon has paid his tribute to the military genius of the commander. The returning exiles defeated the soldiers of Savoy in more than one pitched battle. One thinks of them generally as the 'slaughtered saints, whose bones' inspired one of the finest of Milton's sonnets, but theirs were not the only bones that whitened the valleys during that notable expedition.

Nyon again recalls the memory of Bonstetten, who governed it for a season on behalf of Berne. If all the Bernese Governors had been like him, Vaud would have been a contented country, thoughhe is chiefly remembered as a wit and a man of culture, who lived to be eighty-seven without ever seeming to grow old. In his youth he travelled in England, and was the friend of Gray; in his old age he lived at Geneva, and was the friend of Byron. In the meantime he had been the friend of Madame de Staël, and a pillar of the cosmopolitan society at Coppet. He wrote some books, but they are dead and buried. What lives is the recollection of the genial old gentleman whom everybody liked, and who proved—what needed a great deal of proving—that it was possible for a Bernese to be gracious and frivolous, and to have a sense of humour. He detested the society of his native city, and wrote a delightfully sarcastic description of its daily life in a letter to one of the Hallers:

'We are living here, as we always do. We sleep, we breakfast, we yawn, we drag through the morning, and we digest our food. And then we dine, and then we dress, and then we swagger in the Arcades, and say to ourselves: "I am charming and clever, for the spelling of my name makes me capable of governing and illuminating two hundred thousand souls." And then we accost a lady with a pretty figure decently enveloped in a mantle, and then we go to a party and circle round a dozenturtle-doves, and deliver ourselves of platitudes with the air of saying something clever. Then we have something to eat, and, finding our intellectual resources exhausted, amuse ourselves with paper games; and then we go to bed, feeling satisfied with ourselves—for we have been delightful.'

Out of sympathy with Berne, Bonstetten had a good deal more sympathy than Berne liked with the revolutionary party. It is said that his sympathies lost him his post; but before that happened he had time to render a useful service to one of the most eminent of the revolutionists. He was at supper one day with a considerable number of guests when his servant whispered in his ear that a mysterious stranger was without, asking to speak with him. He stepped into the garden, where a man, miserably dressed, was waiting for him in the summer-house. He inquired his errand, and the answer was: 'I am Carnot, and I am perishing from hunger. I implore you to give me shelter for the night.' Bonstetten not only gave him shelter for the night, but, on the following morning, gave him a passport under an assumed name. One can understand that his superiors at Berne did not regard him as a model functionary, but Carnot never forgot his kindness. When he becameNapoleon's War Minister, he invited him to Paris, introduced him to the Emperor, and heaped proofs of his gratitude upon him.

CULLY FROM EPESSE: AUTUMN

Perhaps it is also worth noting that, in the days before the railways, Nyon was on the highroad from France to Switzerland. The track descended there from Saint-Cergues, where it crossed the Jura; and by it travelled Madame de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, and Voltaire, and many another whom we have met in the course of this rambling narrative. There is a new road now, with wide, sweeping curves, and a gentle gradient; but enough of the old road remains to show us how shamefully bad it was—a narrow road, of uneven surface, plunging headlong through the pine-forest. The lumbering old coaches, with their six horses, must have had a very bad time there, and it is no wonder that Napoleon ordered a road to be made over the Col de la Faucille to supersede it.

But enough of Nyon and the Canton de Vaud! We must cross the lake to the French shore; and, as first impressions are always the most graphic, permission has been obtained to print here the writer's own first impressions, contributed a few years since, to the columns of thePall Mall Gazette.

What strikes the holiday traveller about the French shore is that it is so much better managed than the Swiss shore. Its natural advantages are fewer—they are, in fact, very few indeed. Evian—and when one speaks of the French shore one is principally thinking of Evian—stands with its back to the high mountains instead of facing them. Consequently it has no views to compare with the views from Lausanne, Geneva, and Vevey. Its hinterland is commonplace, except for those who make a great effort and go up the Dent d'Oche. The mouth of the Dranse, hard by, is a dreary collection of detritus. There are hardly any literary landmarks, except the few that recall the memory of St. Francis de Sales. Whence English travellers have, almost with one accord, drawn the inference that it is not worth while to go to Evian. But they are wrong. The French think otherwise,and the French are right. They do not go there, as some suppose, because they are crippled with diseases and need the waters to wash poisons out of their blood and their organs: the Evian water is the sort of water that the whole, as well as the sick, can drink by the bucketful without feeling a penny the worse for it. Their purpose in going to Evian is to live a life of luxury and leisure. No doubt they pay through the nose for the privilege. Inquiry at one hotel elicited the statement that the worst rooms were let at eight and the best at eighty francs a day—with serviceà la carteon the same scale. But other hotels are cheaper, and it is also possible to hire a villa, a flat, a lodging; and, in any case, it is right that Evian should be introduced to the English tourist as the one place on the Lake of Geneva in which the life of leisure and luxury is possible.

There is no real luxury at Geneva itself, though there are high prices and immense hotels. Instead of having good music at fixed hours, they have indifferent music all day long. The whole air is full of a continual tinkle-tinkle; louder than the tinkle-tinkle rises the hooting of the steamers and the trams; louder still are the voices of the trippers, mostly Americans, inquiring the prices ofthings, or complaining that they have lost their luggage. The society at the boasted Kursaal is an unpolished horde, mainly composed of the Geneva clerks and shop-assistants losing their salaries atpetits chevaux. Nor are things much better elsewhere on the Swiss shore. Nyon, for instance, is by nature an earthly paradise, and they have formed a society for developing it. What they really want is a society for cleaning it, since it is the present practice of the inhabitants to empty their dustbins over their garden walls into the lake, with results appalling to the nostrils of the stranger. At Lausanne, or Vevey, or Montreux—other earthly paradises—you escape this nuisance; but even there, in the season, you have the feeling that the place is one vast hotel, and that everybody is waiting with packed boxes for the omnibus. But cross to Evian. The town is a little smaller than Montreux, but just as full. Yet it never seems to be crowded. There is no hurrying or bustling. You are in nobody's way, and nobody is in your way; which means that Evian is properly managed.

They do not encourage you to come to Evian in the capacity of tripper. On the contrary, they try to arrange things so that you must sacrifice yourlunch in order to get there, and your dinner in order to get home. But this is a part of the secret of good management, as you will appreciate if you stay there. No knickerbockered army, headed by a polyglot guide in a straw hat with a label on it, will invade your peace, but you will be free to live your lotus-eating life in your own way. You will probably live most of it in the casino, which is a proper casino, differing from the Geneva Kursaal as cheese from chalk. There is so much shade that it is always cool there, even on the hottest day. You will lunch there on a shaded terrace, assisted by a sympathetic waiter, who understands that a good lunch is an end in itself, and not merely a device for keeping body and soul together until the evening. You will linger long and agreeably over the coffee and liqueurs, without feeling that someone else wants your seat. Nor will you be bothered, as in Geneva, by the squeaking of a futile fiddle, or by hawkers offering picture postcards. But, at the appointed hour, there will be a proper concert with a programme, and a well-behaved and well-dressed audience: beautiful French ladies looking as if they had stepped out of fashion plates; beautiful French children looking as if they had been cut out of Aunt Louisa's picture-book; fantastic Frenchmen,looking as if they were dressed for amateur theatricals. Then, when the evening comes, and you have dined as well as you have lunched, there will be a performance in the little theatre, given by artistes from Paris, who come on to Evian from Aix-les-Bains: Réjane, Jeanne Granier, Charlotte Wiehe, or others. Or there will be a ball in the grand style—not in the least like the balls in the Hall-by-the-Sea at Margate—given in as good a ballroom as the heart of a dancer could wish for. But no hurrying, or hustling, or excitement. At Evian, if nowhere else on Lake Leman, life is a leisurely pageant.

GRANDVAUX FROM CULLY

For the rest, there is little enough for you to do—nothing, in fact, except to stroll up and down the long avenue of linked plane-trees by the lake-side, observe how clean they keep the water, and gaze across its calm surface to the Swiss shore where the trippers make a noise. But this has always been a favourite occupation of the dwellers on the French shore, whether in fact or works of fiction. From Meillerie St. Preux gazed across at thebosquetof Clarens. From Thonon St. Francis de Sales gazed across, pondering plans for working the Counter-Reformation in the Canton de Vaud. From Evian itself, Madame de Warens gazed across,regretting the home of her youth to which she could never return, because, when she left it, she had abandoned her religion, and taken with her certain goods and chattels which her creditors were about to seize.

The history of the French shore, which has only recently belonged to France, may be told in briefest outline. In the earliest times of which we need take cognizance it belonged to the Dukes of Savoy, whose domains continued for a considerable distance up the valley of the Rhone. Then came the war of 1536, of which we have spoken more than once, in which the Bernese took the territory away from them. Part of it was recovered by Duke Emanuel Philibert in 1564, and the whole was reassigned by treaty in 1593. The inhabitants had, in the meantime, been converted to Protestantism, and the first task of Savoy was to reconvert them. A mission for that purpose was led by St. Francis de Sales, and the principles of the Counter-Reformation quickly triumphed. The French Revolution brought a French army to Savoy, but the expelled rulers came to their own again when the Holy Alliance resettled the map of Europe. Nothingfurther happened until the war which resulted in the consolidation of a United Italy. Savoy (together with Nice) was then Napoleon III.'s reward for ejecting the Austrian garrison from Italian territory. The country had long been French in its language and its sympathies, and the people were quite willing, if not actively anxious, to change their allegiance; and the history of Savoy has, since that date, belonged to the history of France. Its extreme Catholicism, like that of Brittany, gave trouble at the time of the expulsion of the Religious Orders, but that is a question of modern politics into which it is unnecessary to enter here. We will search instead for the historical and literary landmarks.

Our first interesting name is that of Duke Amadeus VIII. The death of his eldest son caused him profound grief, and 'in 1431,' says Bishop Creighton, 'he retired from active life, and built himself a luxurious retreat at Ripaille, whither he withdrew with seven companions to lead a life of religious seclusion. His abode was called the Temple of St. Maurice; he and his followers wore grey cloaks, like hermits, with gold crosses round their necks and long staffs in their hands.' But though Duke Amadeusdressed as a hermit, he hardly lived as one; and as for religious seclusion, he interpreted it after a fashion of his own. 'Vitam magis voluptuosam quam penitentialem degebat,' is the statement of his biographer, Æneas Sylvius; and his jovial proceedings added to the French language the new expression 'faire Ripaille.'

Those were the days, however, when the Council of Basle accused Pope Eugenius IV. of heresy and schism. An Opposition Pope was wanted, and the Council decided to offer the dignity to the ducal hermit, who was living a voluptuous rather than a penitential life. A deputation was sent to wait upon him at Ripaille. Amadeus, with his hermit companions, advanced to meet the visitors, with a cross borne before him, and discussed the proposal in a thoroughly business-like spirit. 'What,' he asked, 'do you expect the Pope to live on? I cannot consume my patrimony and disinherit my sons.' He was promised a grant of first-fruits of vacant benefices, and that satisfied him, though he made the further stipulation that he should not be required to shave. As a matter of fact, however, he was presently shamed into shaving by the respectful amazement of the devout; and he took the name of Felix V. and entered Basleattended by his two sons—'an unusual escort for a Pope,' as Creighton justly remarks—and was crowned by the Cardinal of Aries, the only Cardinal present, on July 24, 1440.

The question then arose, Which Pope would be recognized by the other European Principalities and Powers? By degrees it was found that the balance of opinion was against Felix V., and in favour of Eugenius IV. and his successor Nicolas V.; and Felix V. then discovered that he did not greatly care about his somewhat shadowy honours. He had had much anxiety, and only a small and irregular stipend. So, on April 7, 1449, he was persuaded to resign the Papal office, and less than two years afterwards he died. 'He was more useful to the Church by his death than by his life,' says Æneas Sylvius. But that is as it may be. He was, at all events, an interesting figure and a better man than Æneas himself, seeing that Æneas, afterwards Pius II., candidly confessed that he was 'neither holier than David nor wiser than Solomon,' and actually wrote love-letters to help Sigismund, Count of Tyrol, 'to overcome the resistance of a girl who shrank from his dishonourable proposals.'

THE RHONE VALLEY FROM CHEXBRES

A greater figure—perhaps the greatest of all figures in the history of Savoy—is that of St. Francis de Sales. It is a little difficult to speak of him without appearing to stir the embers of theological disputation. But the effort must be made, since he is much too notable a man to be passed over; and the task may be made easier by the fact that he is a Catholic of whom Protestants speak well, even though they have to recognize in him one of the most damaging of their opponents. They respect his character even in the act of examining his propositions; they perceive that it was just because his character was so admirable that he was able to do the cause of the Reformation so much harm.

He combined qualities which, in that age, were rarely found conjoined, being at once a gentleman and a scholar, a man of saintly humility, and yet of energy and courage. Such men were scarce inboth religious camps. The Reformers had their share of virile vigour, and the best of them were among the most learned men of their time; but, on the whole, they lacked good manners and 'sweet reasonableness.' Their methods were often violent, and their speech was often coarse. They upset altars and smashed stained-glass windows, and threw sacred images into the rivers, and, as we have seen, 'crowned Roman Catholic priests with cow-dung.' Their vocabulary, too, was scurrilous, as was natural, seeing that many of them had risen to eminence in their church from some very humble rank in life. They lacked the grand style in theology, and one could find excuses for calling them vulgarians.

No doubt there was more of the grand style among their Catholic opponents, but they also fell short in many ways of the Christian ideal. Many of them were dissolute debauchees. The case of Æneas Sylvius, already cited, shows that the most cynical immorality was not incompatible with the highest ecclesiastical advancement, and, indeed, it is notorious that the loose lives of ecclesiastical dignitaries did more than their unscriptural doctrines to discredit the Church of Rome and make the Reformation possible. There were prelates of whom it could truly be said that they sparedneither men in their anger nor women in their lust; and even among those whose reputation was sweeter, there were a good many who would have passed a very bad quarter of an hour if haled before Calvin's Consistory and cross-examined. Even if they had passed the moral standards, they would have been found guilty of luxury and arrogance. They were unduly addicted to purple and fine linen, and made no pretence to live a simple life.

On each side, however, there were exceptions, exempt from the characteristic faults of their parties, and these, even in that age of vehement polemics, were able to recognize and appreciate one another. On the Protestant side there was M. de Bèze—the 'gentleman reformer,' as he has been called—who, drawing a useful inspiration from the memories of his unregenerate days, was able to speak affably with his enemies in the gate. On the Catholic side there was St. Francis de Sales, whom the study of the Humane Letters had indeed humanized, who was transparently sincere, and who, by the charm of his character, disarmed antagonism. In an age in which men of all religious opinions (and of none) lived in daily peril of torture and the stake, each of these two menbelieved that the other was honestly mistaken, and would have liked to be his friend.

Judged by the historical results of his principal achievement, St. Francis can hardly escape condemnation as a maker of mischief and a stirrer-up of strife. To him, and to him alone, was due the triumph of the Counter-Reformation in Chablais. If he had declined that missionary enterprise, or failed in it, the Duke of Savoy would not have been encouraged to make the treacherous attempt upon Genevan independence known as the Escalade. That plot was actually laid at Thonon, at a meeting held to celebrate and rejoice over St. Francis de Sales' apostolic achievements. He must have known of it; he was in a position to protest against it; he does not appear to have done anything of the kind. It went forward, and Spanish soldiers were hired to cut Genevan throats in the name of the Church of St. Peter. There we have cause and effect—a saintly man interfering with freedom of thought, and so bringing, not peace, but a sword.

That is the summing-up of the matter which impartial logic compels; but, somehow or other, it does not much interfere with the friendliness of one's feelings towards St. Francis de Sales. Therude logic of events did not correspond to any syllogism in his mind. The narrowness of his outlook was that of his country and his age; the sweetness of his temper was his own. He loved his erring brothers, as he considered them, and his concern was for the salvation of their souls. He did disinterestedly, and at great personal sacrifice, the duty which he conceived to lie nearest to him; he did it like a soldier, who must not reason why, and with a serene and lofty courage.

The courage of missionaries has often, it is true, been the subject of exaggerated eulogy. Courage is no uncommon human quality; and it is doubtful whether good men are, on an average, any braver than bad men. It is not only the soldier who, as a matter of course, takes risks quite equal to those of the missionary. The brigand, the highwayman, and the beach-comber, to say nothing of the terrorist, who is generally an atheist, also do so; and, these things being so, much of the talk about the heroism of Christian heroes is almost indecently vainglorious. Yet, even when all the necessary deductions have been made, there remains something singularly fascinating in the courage of St. Francis de Sales.

He was not by nature pugnacious, as was, forexample, Farel, who took an Irishman's delight in a row, and considered that it was all in the day's work when he was fustigated by women, or dragged up and down the floor of a church by the beard. His tastes, on the contrary, were refined, and his inclinations were for the life of the cloister or the study. He went into the wilds of Chablais—and it was really a wild country in those days—because he had been called and chosen, and because there was work to be done there which he was considered specially capable of doing. Men with guns took pot-shots at him in the dark places of the forests; and he once spent a whole winter's night in a tree-top, while a pack of hungry wolves howled at him from below. Such adventures were repugnant to his gentle and sensitive nature; but he faced them and persevered, year after year, until at last his pertinacity was rewarded. More as a tribute to his unique personality than to his arguments—which, of course, were only the commonplaces of Catholic apologetics—Chablais surrendered to the Church. Even though one wishes that Chablais had held out, one cannot help regarding its evangelist as a sympathetic figure. Pope Alexander VII. canonized him in 1665.

THE CHURCH OF ST. MARTIN, VEVEY

St. Francis de Sales, was not only a missionary, but also a man of letters, and—especially—a patron of letters. Thirty years before Richelieu founded the French Academy, he founded the Florimontane Academy—with the mottoFlores fructusque perennes—in Savoy, and thus forged one of the links between the literature of Savoy and that of France. More than one great writer, whom we carelessly class as French, was really of Savoyard origin. Vaugelas, described by Sainte-Beuve 'as the first of our correct and polished grammarians,' was the son of the Vaugelas who helped St. Francis de Sales in the formation of his literary society at Annecy. St. Réal, the forerunner of Montesquieu, was also a Savoyard; and so were Count Xavier de Maistre, author of the widely-read 'Voyage Autour de ma Chambre,' and Count Joseph de Maistre, his more distinguished brother.

Joseph de Maistre, indeed, is the greatest of the literary sons of Savoy, and a worthy inheritor of the traditions of the saint, his predecessor. An aristocrat, and a senator, he was a man of forty when the revolutionary storm burst upon his country. For a season he took refuge in Lausanne, where he often met, and argued with, Madame de Staël, whom he regarded as a woman with a good heart but a perverted head. His discussions with her, he said, 'nearly made the Swiss die with laughing, though we conducted them without quarrelling.' Afterwards he was sent to represent his sovereign at the Court of St. Petersburg, where, he complains, he had to get on as best he could, 'without a salary, without a secretary, and without a fur-lined overcoat.' Both there and at Lausanne he wrote.

His date and his circumstances class him with the literaryémigrés—with Madame de Staël, Châteaubriand, and Sénancour; but he lacks their melancholy and their sentimentalism. He and Châteaubriand, indeed, resemble one another as two champions of the Catholic religion; but they support that religion from widely different points of view. Châteaubriand is before all things the religious æsthete. He deduces the truth of a creedfrom its beauty, and is very little concerned with its bearing upon moral conduct. Joseph de Maistre, on the contrary, seems to believe in the authority of the Church because he believes in authority generally. He is an Absolutist who hates all Radicals, and regards the schismatic as the worst kind of Radical. He makes a religion of the principle of 'keeping people in their place,' and he supports his religion with epigrams. The epigrams are very good, though the religion is very bad. The French, like the sound critics that they are, have proved themselves capable of enjoying the one while refusing to have very much to do with the other.

BILLING AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, GUILFORD

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