MR. COLLINS ON SAINT-SIMON.*
" THERE is scarcely any delusion which has a claim to be more in- dulgently treated than that under the influence of which a man ascribes every moral excellence to those who have left imperish- able monuments of their genius The debt which he owes to them is incalculable. They have guided him to truth. They have filled his mind with noble and graceful images. They have stood by him in all vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude. Those friendships are exposed to no danger from the occurrences by which other attachments are weakened or dissolved. Time glides on ; fortune is inconstant, tempers are soured ; bonds which seemed indissoluble are daily sundered by in- terest, by emulation, or by caprice. But no such cause can affect the silent converse which we hold with the highest of human intellects. That placid intercourse is disturbed by no jealousies or resentments. These are the old friends who are never seen with new faces, who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and obscurity. With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet."
Such are the touching words in which the fiercest critic of this generation records his noble gratitude to the great authors whom he loved, and it is with something of the prejudice thus masterly described that the present writer must speak, when treating of Saint-Simon. To read in this immense collec- tion of portraits drawn with an impress of truth which no evidence, however forcible, can entirely destroy ; to listen to this endless succession of dialogues, related with a beauty and completeness so unrivalled as perforce to make us waver in our trust, and doubt if ever men and women spoke with such unerring fitness, such perfect dramatic effect ; and to peruse page after page of an invective terrible as the masterpieces of ancient eloquence, and with an awful earnest- ness of tone, a conviction almost Puritan iu intensity, that those denounced by the writer are the enemies of God and man, accursed and desperately wicked,—to find so ninny kinds of writing, all excellent, and all requiring such rare and varied gifts, by the same hand, cannot but make the student of Saint- Simon feel the subtile spell described by Lord Macaulay, and give him the desire, at all events, to think well of the man to whom he owes such deep and enduring delight.
It is, we suppose, a virtue to have got the better of this weak- ness, and to judge even the greatest of mankind impartially. It is a virtue, however, which we hope never to attain, and one which we could wish to see less developed in Mr. Collins. We cannot, indeed, find fault with most of his criticisms. We must at once admit that the great Duke was over credulous, and a wretched judge of historical evidence ; that in his friendships, as in his enmities, he was intensely prejudiced ; that his ideal polity was the absurdest that ever crossed the brain of a sane man ; and that, in military matters, " mere prattle," and malignant prattle, " without practice, was all his soldiership." One passage, indeed, we think Mr. Collins might have spared us,—that in which he more than hints that Saint-Simon rejoiced in the ruinous defeats of the Spanish war, and would even appear to suggest that the Duke should have been with the army, instead of " sitting at home at ease," and " fulfilling his self-imposed mission of spy and reporter." Now, it appears to us that even the most careless reader of the ifonoirs must be impressed with their author's deep and ardent patriotism. Saint-Simon loved France truly and well, so that even the very vehemence of his attacks upon the soldiers and statesmen of his day was in great measure due to a real devo- tion to his country.
Mr. Collins, we have said, is severe, no doubt with perfect justice, on his author's manifold defects as an historian. We wish we could congratulate that gentleman on his own accurate knowledge of the times which he professes to describe. Every man of ordinary intelligence and education knows that the car- dinal event in the history of West Europe during the last quar- ter of the seventeenth century was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Every Englishman who has read his Macaulay has learnt that our own Revolution, that great achievement on which our whole modern history turns, was the reply of the Protestant Powers to the challenge given by the French King in expelling
• Foreign Classics for English Readers. Edited by Mrs. Oli hant. Saini-Simon, by
Clifton W. Collies, M.L. William Blackwood and Bons, glt and London.
his Huguenot subjects. Now, we can scarcely suppose that Mr. Collins is unacquainted with the best known historical work in the language, a work, too, which deals with the very time of which he is writing, and with all the chief personages and leading events mentioned by his author. Yet to imagine that any one can ever have read those brilliant pages, and still have for- gotten the repeated and striking passages in which the French refugee soldiers are mentioned, is well-nigh impossible. Has the catalogue of Williams troops, one of the most picturesque pieces of English prose with which we are acquainted, entirely escaped Mr. Collins's memory P Does he not even recollect the passage of the Boyne, and Caillemot's death at the head of his regiment ? And if he does remember all this, can he by any conceivable possibility have forgotten the date of the Revolution itself. Yet, if he has not done so, how -does he account for the presence of three entire regiments of French Protestants and an immense body of officers in England -in 1688, when, as he gravely informs us, the Edict of Nantes 'was not revoked till 1693, " and then began that persecution which was made infamous by what were known in history as the' Dragonnades of Louvois ?' " It would not have been easy to show greater ignorance in a single sentence. First of all, we have a mistake of eight years in the most important date of the period of which Mr. Collins writes, then we have the state- ment that the persecution of the Huguenots began after the Revocation, whereas, as every one knows, and as a glance at such common books of reference as Depping or Benoist's History would have shown, it began several years `before ; and finally, we are informed that the " Dragonnades of Louvois " were instituted two years after Louvois was dead. After this, we were scarcely surprised to hear that Ramillies was fought the " next year" after Blenheim. If Mr. Collins has not time or inclination for graver studies, we should recom- mend him to turn to Mr. Thackeray's novel of Esmond, where Ire will find that famous victory correctly assigned to the year 1706.
But Mr. Collins's carelessness is not confined to dates. In the chapter on " Jesuits and Jansenists," we have found some very remarkable statements. We are not so exacting as to expect every writer who treats of Jansenism to be per- sonally acquainted with the " Augustinus," but we think that a little study of Saint-Beuve's wonderful Histoire de Port Royal would have shown Mr. Collins that no Jan- senist ever held such an extravagant doctrine as that " divine grace" is "obtained only by continual prayer." Here, again, the editor has been singularly successful in demonstrating, in the fewest possible words, his entire ignorance of the whole controversy with which he deals. No one, we should have thought, who had read of the conversion of Saint Paul—cer- tainly no theologian in the Catholic Church—could for a moment entertain a proposition so absurd. To attribute such teaching to these life-long students of Saint Augustine, the -very peculiarity of whose teaching lay in a special insistence on the spontaneous character of grace, and the utter inability of fallen man to contribute by any effort of his own to its opera- tion on the soul, is a strangely unhappy blunder. Had Mr. Collins attributed such a doctrine to the school of Molina, he would have bemi egregiously mistaken, but his error would hare been pardonable, indeed, compared with that into which he has here fallen. Theology is evidently not his strong point., and we advise him to let such difficult subjects as the contro- versies on the nature of grace alone, until he has time to study them with some little attention.
His observations on the Jansenist worship are not much better than his exposition of their doctrine. " The music and the incense," he tells us, "the paintings and the images, the embroidery and the vestments, were all proscribed there was to be no high mass, and no frequent celebration of the sacrament." We believe that as to music, Mr. Collins is so far right, that the community of Port Royal, in common with many other orthodox religions houses, confined themselves to the plainer sorts. But with this single exception, it is our con- viction that every one of the numerous assertions thus con- fidently made is incorrect. If Mr. Collins will but visit the long gallery of the Louvre, he will there perceive a well-known paint- ing by Phillipe de Champagne, which hung in the chapter- house of Port Royal till the destruction of the monastery. If he will open Sainte-Beuve's history, and read the account of the miracle which that picture commemorates, he will Lad that at the very moment of the cure, " On sonna l'elevation de la grand'messe." If he will look at the touching account of M. de Saci's funeral, given by his heart-broken dis- ciple, Fontaine, he will learn how the body lay clothed for the last time in the priestly vestments (habits sacerdotaux), and was sprinkled with holy water, and incensed after the ritual of the Catholic Church. And if this will not suffice, he may find the like particulars in Tronchai's description of the burial of perhaps the grandest and purest of all the great and simple characters Port Royal produced,—the perfect type of the Christian scholar, the learned and saintly Tillemont.
We have yet another pilgrimage to recommend Mr. Collins,— a visit to Port Royal itself, or rather to the calm and beautiful valley where that celebrated monastery once stood. There he will find, in the little building raised by pious hands amid the all but vanished ruins of the great abbey, the headless statue of some saint once venerated within the chapel walls.
We must further inform Mr. Collins, while upon matters ecclesiastical, that the " Feast of the Epiphany " always " hap- pens" to fall on Twelfth Night; that the " Quarante Hewes" is a solemn rite in the Catholic Church, and is 'quite inadequately translated by " For forty hours prayers were offered everywhere;" and that ladies do not, as a rule, read "breviaries."
It would be tedious to correct all the misstatements we have noted, but there is yet one more, so ludicrous, from the character of the personages concerned, that we cannot pass it by un- noticed. It was, as is well known, one of the refinements of vanity affected by the Princes of the Blood to substitute the first words of their title, " tont court," as it was called, for the full form. Thus the Dauphin was " Monseigneur," the King's brother, " Monsieur," the head of the House of Conde, " M. le Prince," and so on. The ladies, a a rule, took the style of their husbands, and accordingly the King's sister-in- law was called " Madame." There were many other "Madames " "tout court," as Saint-Simon tells us, by birth, for this style was assumed by all the " filles de France," but there could only be one "Madame " by marriage at the same time. But although this assertion is very distinctly made in the Memoirs, we fancy that we can remember seeing the title occa- sionally given to the wife of Monseigneur, as well as to the wife of Monsieur. Both these ladies were Germans, and both loved their old country better than France. But here the resemblance ends. No two human creatures could differ more completely in character than the feeble, timid woman, who died from the reme- dies she took against imaginary complaints, and the sturdy, hon- est, warm-hearted, foul-mouthed, and thoroughly lovable virago, who spent hours every day in the saddle, boxed her son's ears in the royal presence for daring to marry a royal bastard, and won even Louis's affection and respect by her blunt German ways. But this worthy soul could hate as honestly as ever she loved, and amongst the objects of her peculiar detestation was the " little German maid, Bessola," with whom Mr. Collins makes her talk so confidentially. If that gentleman will take the trouble to open Madame's correspondence (of which a new French edition has recently appeared), he will learn that Bessola was the maid, not of Madame, Duchess of Orleans, but of Madame, Dauphiness of France, and that the Duchess always speaks of " cette mechante et perfide sorciere de Bessola" as her own personal enemy, and the evil counsellor who wrecked the career of her unhappy mistress.
We had originally purposed to say ourselves a few words upon the famous Memoirs which Mr. Collins is supposed to have made known to English readers, but it has taken us so long to correct the mistakes of the editor, that we have not space left us in which to deal with the author. Nor, indeed, is this to be regretted, for we have felt with fresh force, as we again looked at these inimitable pages, our inability to convey even a faint idea of the combination of splendid audacity, subtile and patient analysis, and perfect finish which mark the finer passages, without printing extracts too lengthy and numerous for any article of the present kind.
It may, perhaps, be doubted whether any quotations, how- ever skilfully made, can give a true notion of Saint-Simon. We would not, indeed, lay it down as absolutely necessary, for a due appreciation of his merits, that the student should make his way through the whole forty volumes, though (pace Mr. Collins), we fancy that many persons besides M. Cheruel have had the honour of performing the feat ; but we are convinced that only- those who have rambled at their own good pleasure through this vast treasure-house of good things, picking out a story here, a graphic sketch, touched as only Saint-Simon can touch, a little further on, a bit of piquant gossip now, and again a burst of honest indignation, from the surrounding lumber, will ever enjoy the real flavour of Saint-Simon. There is no true epicure but loves to open his own oysters, and no true student who can bear " selections." And after all, it is impossible to discover the good things without reading the whole book, so that really though we do not exact, still we feel constrained to counsel a perusal of the entire work ; the merest " skim " will be enough, and once the reader has found tie richer veins, he will not readily forget them. Of one thing we are quite certain, that Saint-Simon's writings can never be popular in an English dress. We think, therefore, that they should not have been included in the present series, and we are sure that Mr. Collins should not have been selected to edit them.
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