BOOKS.
LAMENNAIS.*
'Tiffs is a careful translation, in adequate English, of Lamennais' most characteristic work. It expresses his genius -better than even the Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion, which made his fame, or the Sketch of a Philosophy which, however vast in conception, has gone far to unmake his reputation for "a learning and logic superior to Bossnet's," which. Mazzini claims for him in the memoir prefixed to this -volume. Written in 1839, we know not why Mazzini's cer- tificate of Lamennais' revolutionary power is considered worth reprinting in 1891. In the perspective of nearly forty years, and in the light of their history, we can better gauge the archangel of mystical democracy. If not in the exact direction or with the speed he expected, European society has moved far from his standpoint, He helped to increase the * Words of a 1306mer, and The Past and Futuro of the People. By F. Lamennais. Translated by L. S. Martineau. London : Chapman and Ball. 1891, power of human majorities, or, as he would have said, "general consent," both in creeds and governments, and some of his apocalyptic forecasts have the interest of fulfilled as of un- fulfilled prophecy. To appreciate intelligently the Words of a Believer, it is very necessary to know something of the writer in his whole career, for to an unusual extent La- mennais was affected by circumstances the riddle of his mental and moral variations would be inexplicable without reference to the times, and even to the race of which he came.
Felicite Robert de la Mennais was one of those Bretons who have added to French thought an imaginative seriousness, spiritual insight, and sensitive appreciation of the noble use of words which have gone far to give France her place in the intellectual realm. The Abbe Feli, as his intimates loved to call him, was born in 1782 at St. Malo. His father, a rich shipowner, bought the estate of La Mennais ; he was ennobled by that title shortly before the great Revolution; and until he transferred his loyalty from the white to the red flag, La- mennais used the particule. He and his elder brother Jean were brought up in the straitest Vendean creed by an uncle, but free access to his heterogeneous library sowed even in childhood the seeds of revolt and dis- belief which stopped all preparations for Feli's first com- munion. At nine, the child is said to have unmoored a boat and pushed off to "defy the sea ;" at fourteen, he already wrote in some forgotten journals, in probably a similar mood. He was small and never robust, but he had Irish blood in him by descent from an exile of 1688, and be was a hard rider and a rough liver, not blameless in his moral con- duct, but of that ardent intellect which subordinates bodily satisfaction to thought, and is ascetic by choice.
When he was twenty-two, however, he underwent a spiritual change ; he renounced his errors with the bitterness to be expected from his self-esteem, but the sincerity which only failed him at a later point of his career. In 1808, the first- fruits of his conversion appeared in the Reflections on the Condition of the Church in France. The book was suppressed by Foucha, and not unwisely, for in it was sounded the first note of his lifelong assault on Napoleon's Concordat, and on the negations and materialism of the eighteenth century. The Genie du Christianisme was in the air, De Maistre and Bonald were sharpening their swords, and Lamennais passionately appealed to the clergy to preach ideal rather than political aims. Yet Lamennais' Ultramontane zeal was that of a Royalist who believed that the battle-cry of "Throne and Altar" could only be applied to the Bourbon dynasty and the Vatican. Even then his craving for Utopias as perilous in the intellectual order as is opium in the physical, was a danger to him ; but he was at that time much influenced by his admirable elder brother, the Abbe Jean. In 1814 they wrote together on the institution of Bishops, always in the high Ultramontane sense. During Napoleon's" hundred days," Fell sought a tutorship in England; but his appearance was against him with strangers, and he applied for help to the Abbe Carron, the excellent almoner of the French Royal family. Lamennais was at that time extremely susceptible to friendship. He had entered minor orders six years before ; he now resolved to follow in his benefactor's footsteps, and became a priest without a true vocation. The priesthood at thirty-four was to him not a crystallising but a solvent force. It was a time of many mirages, and Lamennais was fatally disposed to think them true, fatally angered by their dispersion. Unversed in men, untrained by historical study, his conceptions of facts were often false. Disdainful of all experimental knowledge, his chimeras became to him the only trustworthy truths. He admitted no compromise between what was wholly bad and wholly good; no correspondence between an imaginary past and a yet more imaginary future. The present hardly existed except as a gate through which his hopes pressed forward. He had vast learning; his rhetoric intoxicated himself even more than his followers. When events did not fall out as he expected, he made for himself new ideals, and thundered against those he had abandoned. But Lamennais remains probably the greatest master of invective in the French language ; and his were noble aims suggested by the distress of Europe after the fall of Napoleon and the rein- stallation of outworn Governments. In 1817 appeared the first volume of his Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion. It stirred the emotional conscience of France to its depths. It has been called "an earthquake under a leaden
sky." Not foreseeing that he would prove a Tertullian, Lamennais was hailed as the "latest of the Fathers" by the clergy. To Royalists and Christians alike, he appeared the new Michael who could bind the Satan of anarchy. Forty thousand copies of his book, which was a splendid defence of Catholic dogma, without defining its bases or its claims, were quickly sold. It awakened hope in the many already sick of the shifty Governments controlled by Metternich's diplomacy. It also awakened a hostility which discovered that the author had built but a gorgeous cloud-castle illumined by heavenly light, yet only a vapour. The three remaining volumes of his Essay were devoted to logical proof of the Church's divine mission. Denying that individual reason is capable of judgment in such questions, he made "general consent" the only ground of certitude. Clothed in his marvellous rhetoric, the doctrine dazzled many. The drift of the time already tended to consecration of majorities, and many zealous souls in all ranks were elated, by his vision of a theo- cracy founded on an aggregate reason of which the Pope should be the mouthpiece. It would be at once the most absolute and the most democratic of Governments. It could dispense with historical aid, for tradition, which it invoked as the deposit of "consent," replaced fact. As Lamennais too clearly saw, it could do without the Christ whose name was ever on his lips, except as He was the instrument of social evolution, a link in the chain which held, together all the religions of the world. There is much rough value in his theory, but it could not give Lamennais the amount of certi- tude he required for that victory which he claimed over all earlier creeds and philosophies. Meantime the Gallican clergy were alarmed, and with reason. The excesses of revolution were fresh in their memories, and still hoping much from Royalty, they werb not as prepared as they are now to asso- ciate dogma and liberty, or to perceive the benefits of a "Free Church in a free State." But the Pope was necessary as the key-stone of Lamennais' system, if Christ were not. In 1824 he visited Rome, and was kindly received by Leo XII.; but he returned without definite approval, and with bitterness in his heart. His millennium was put off. Faith could not yet he safely exchanged for "general consent," or personal sanctity and humility forgotten in the elation of triumphant fraternity. He found Rome, as he wrote to a friend, "the seat of fear and pusillanimity." Before his disappointment at the Vatican, however, Lamennais was drifting fast from the temporary anchorage of his priesthood into purely political struggle. When we read his voluminous correspondence—he wrote some thousand letters a year—we see the slow decline from the Christian champion to the demagogue. His methods savoured more and more of dynamite than 'of leaven. It is said that Leo named him as Cardinal in petto ; but Lamennais asked only for a dispensation from reciting his daily office, on the plea that to him action was more useful than meditation ; yet at periods of his stormy life he loved the Imitation. His translation of it, and his notes, remain his one uncensured work, and by its steady sale he chiefly subsisted in the pathetic wreck of his later years. We would not judge him harshly, but from the first he seems the antithesis of its teaching, and as emphatically wanting in humility and self-conquest, and in mystic recognition of the true bead of the Church, the true fountain of human sympathy, as the Imitation is excelling in the same qualities.
In 1826, the idea, suggested by Gerbet, of a special congre- gation being founded to spread his neo-Catholicism, was eagerly adopted by Lamennais. A group of faithful and brilliant young men assembled at his Breton home, La °belittle. Maurice de Guorin has exquisitely portrayed its forest lands, the low-lying clouds and sudden gleams that swept across the scene while Lamennais led the band of hopeful prophets, and mixed legends, now of Druids, now of Saints, with theories of future escape from the bonds of past servitude. He bad a quiet sweetness of manner, a paternal kindness and simplicity, which contrasted with his serried arguments and the rapid flow of his splendid thought. Dressed with carelessness, often without a soutane, he was insignificant and weakly in appear- ance. His head slightly stooped upon his breast, his hands clasped before him, a simple question could rouse him to a rhetoric which seemed to create truisms as he spoke. He played with words as he chose, and hie hearers followed in breathless faith.
He had long lapsed from Monarchical principles when 1830 came. Not Loais Philippe's gospel of wealth, but the liberty
he seemed to guarantee, opened a new horizon for Europe. Again Lamennais flung himself forward as the reconstructor. of a golden, but not an Arcadian age. Of Rome he was sus- picious; but society must have a religious tradition, and he found no help in Protestant individualism. Nothing short of an infallible certitude could satisfy his passionate logic. The Avenir was founded with "God. and Liberty" as its watch- words. Montalembert, burning to use O'Connell's methods, and' Lacordaire were its editors, under the direction of Lamennais.. No doubt Metternich's policy had shackled the Vatican, and so Galilean was France, that she seemed nearing schism ; but the fine eloquence of the Avenir overlooked the slow processes. of human evolution. Freedom from State control, freedom to educate and to associate, was claimed for the clergy ; more liberty, in short, than either clergy, Governments, or even the masses could digest. For the first time, every burning ques- tion of the day wan examined in a newspaper. Savonarola, descended into the arena of the daily Press.
The history of the suppression of the Avenir, and its con-. demnation at Rome, the pilgrimage of its three editors to the feet of Gregory XVI., who "only took snuff" and discoursed of art in a private interview with Lamennais, are familiar to all who have read Lives of Montalembert and Laeordaire. In his Atfaires de Rome, pleasantest reading of all his works, Lamennais tells how, after long waiting, the three men received the encyclical in which Rome, with inspired or uninspired prudence, refused his formulas of infallibility.. The pilgrims submitted, but Lamennais instantly resolved" to dominate Rome from the height of his obedience," yet with reserves that led to quibbling for two years, and a rapid de- composition of his creed. "Only by my methods can religion be saved," he had said. The Church refused them, and after' a last communion given to the disciples still at La Chenaie, Lamennais uttered the thunders of the book we are reviewing: "Small in size, but immense in perversity," the Pope declared it, and the breach with Rome became complete. Coming hastily from a last pathetic interview with the Archbishop of Paris, who implored him not to defy the Church, Lamennais thrust the manuscript into Sainte-Beuve'e hands. "It is time to make an end," he said. The very printers paused to read the burning words : a hundred thousand copies were at once sold, and it was translated throughout Europe. Never in the French, if in any other language, had there been so scathing an arraignment of the powers that be. The form he gave his invective is familiar to English ears in the " burdens " of Isaiah ; but Lamennais, though saturated with the Vulgate, seems to have adopted the phraseology of Mickiewitz in the Book of the Polish Pilgrims, rather than of the Bible. No rules of literary criticism can apply to the hotly glowing pictures and apologues in .which he uses- alternately the scorn and the sadness of a Lucifer. His. eloquence helps us to excuse the superfluity of "blood" and "mire," and the " Satans " and " tyrants " who cross hie stage "dispersedly ;" and we forgive a certain coarseness of colour for the tender grace of the twenty-fifth and forty-first chapters. Henceforth Lamennais hoped only in the "People;" but his ideals were well-nigh dead in him when 1848 made him. Deputy for Paris, and without them he was but an ordinary man of letters, the friend of George Sand and Sainte-Beuve and Beranger, but refusing the love and tendance of his earlier comrades, always offered to him until the end in I854,. when, with no sign of regret, he was laid silently, by his own wish, in the common grave of the poor, without memorial, and with but the attendance of some half-dozen friends and relations.
• In his ambitious Sketch of a Philosophy and. his translation of the Divine Comedy, generous critics may find something to admire ; but Lamennais had lost his way before he wrote them.. A seer such as this century has not known, when light failed him he had but little scope left for the exercise of hie. wonderful rhetoric. Yet the "travail of his soul" has not been altogether wasted ; much that tended to true progress in brotherhood has been absorbed both by priests and politicians. Perhaps, however, no safer test can be applied to what was defective in his action than to compare his work with that of his elder brother. Fell leaves to society as his best achieve- ment the Words of a Believer. Jean de la Mennais founded at Ploermel the congregation of the "Brothers of Christian Instruction," who count the children they have taught by hundreds of thousands both in France and her Colonies Which has best served human advance P '
Previous page
