Chapter III: Part XIII: NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (continued) (2)

“Alas, yes! and in vain. He thinks that for your sake Henry must fulfil that dream of heroism, which perhaps first won your heart to him. Women very naturally love heroes; but then they must pay the tax for that noble attachment. Henry must become the glory of his country, and the major of a regiment in active service. My dear child—I mean, my dear Mrs Thornhill—don’t cry; be a hero’s wife! Tracey has convinced me that Henry is right; and my firm belief is that the chief motive which makes Henry covet laurels is to lay them at your feet.”

“The darling!” murmured Clara.

“You see your parents very naturally wished you to make a better worldly marriage. That difficulty was smoothed over, not by the merits of Henry, but the money of Sir Percival Tracey. Could you respect your husband if he were not secretly chafed at that thought? He desires to lift himself up to you even in your parents’ eyes, not by a miserable pecuniary settlement effected through a kinsman, but by his own deeds. Oppose that, and you humiliate him. Never humiliate a husband. Yield to it, and you win his heart and his gratitude for ever. Man must never be put into an inferior position to his helpmate. Is not that true? Thank you, my child—(come, the word is out)—for that pressure of my hand. You understand us men. Let Henry leave you, sure that his name will be mentioned with praise in his commanding officer’s report after some gallant action, looking forward to the day when, in command himself, Parliament shall vote him its thanks, and his sovereign award him her honours; and your Henry, as you cling in pride to his breast, shall whisper in words only heard by you—‘Wife mine, your parents are not ashamed of me now! All this is your work! all results from the yearning desire to show that the man whom you had singled out from the world was not unworthy of your love!’”

“But Henry does not say those pretty things,” sighed Clara, half smiling, half weeping.

“Say them? In words, of course not. What man, and especially what Englishman, does say pretty things? It is only authors, who are the interpreters of hearts, that say what lovers and heroes feel. But a look says to the beloved one more than authors can put into words. Henry’s look will tell you what you, his own, his wife, have been to him in the bivouac, in the battle; and you will love and reverence him the more because he does not say the pretty things into which I mince and sentimentalise the calm Englishman’s grand, silent, heartfelt combination of love with duty and with honour. My dear Clara, I speak to you as I would to my own daughter. Let your young soldier go. You and I indeed—the woman and the civilian—may talk as we will of distinctions between the defence of the island and the preservation of the empire. But a soldier is with his country’s flag wherever it is placed—whether in the wilds of Caffraria or on the cliffs of Dover. Clara, am I not right? Yes! you again press my hand. After all, there is not a noble beat in the heart of man which does not vibrate more nobly still in the heart of the wife who loves him!”

Just at this time our little anchor dropped on a fairy island. There was as much bustle on board as if we had discovered a new Columbia. We landed for a few minutes to enjoy a glorious view of the lake, to which this island was the centre, and explore a curious cave, which, according to tradition, had been the dwelling of some unsocial anchorite in Gothic days. The rocky walls of this cell were now inscribed with the names or initials of summer holiday visitors from provincial towns.

“See,” said the Painter, “how instinctive to man is the desire to leave some memorial of himself wherever he has been.”

“Do you acknowledge then,” said Tracey, “that the instinct which roused Joseph Higgins to carve on the rock, for the benefit of distant ages, the fact, that in the year 1837 he visited this spot in company with ‘Martha Brown,’ is but a family branch of the same instinct which makes genius desire to write its name on the ‘flammantia mœnia mundi?’”

“Perhaps,” replied the Painter, “the instinct is the same; but if it be so, that truth would not debase and vulgarise the yearning of genius—it would rather elevate and poetise the desire of Joseph Higgins.”

“Well answered,” said I. “Has any one present a knife that he will not mind blunting? if so, I should like to carve my name under that of Joseph Higgins. It is something to leave a trace of one’s whereabout twenty years hence, even in the rock of this lonely cave.”

Henry produced the knife, and I carved my name under that of Joseph Higgins, with the date, and these words—“A Summer Holiday.” “I have not had many holidays,” said I, “since I left school; let me preserve one from oblivion.” I passed the knife to Tracey.

“Nay,” said he, laughing, “I have no motive strong enough to induce me to take the trouble. I have no special holiday to record—my life is all holiday.”

We re-entered our vessel, and drifted along the lake—the Painter jotting down hints of scenery in his sketch-book, and Percival reading to us aloud from a volume of Robert Browning’s Poems which he had brought with him. He was a great admirer of that poet, and was bent upon making Clara share his own enthusiasm. Certainly he read well, and the poems he selected seemed in harmony with the scene; for there is in Robert Browning a certain freshness and freedom of music, and a certain suggestiveness of quiet thought reflected from natural images, which fit him to be read out of doors, in English landscapes, on summer days.

When we returned from our cruise, we found our rural banquet awaiting us. We were served under an awning suspended from the trunks of two mighty elms, whose branches overhung the water. Lady Gertrude had not exaggerated the culinary skill of the _ci-devant_ housekeeper. What with the fish from the lake, various sorts, dressed in different ways, probably from receipts as old as the monastic days in which fresh-water fishes received the honours due to them—what with some excellent poultry, which, kept in that wild place, seemed to have acquired a finer flavour than farmyard coops bestow—and what with fruits, not rendered malefic by walls of pastry—the repast would have satisfied more refined epicures than we were. Cool, light, sparkling wines, innocent as those which Horace promised to Tyndaris, circled freely. All of us became mirthful, even Clara—all of us except Henry, who still looked as if he were wasting time; and the Painter, who became somewhat too seriously obtrusive of his art, and could with difficulty be kept from merging the whole conversation into criticisms on the landscape effects of Gainsborough contrasted with those of Claude.

After dinner we quietly settled ourselves to our several amusements—Lady Gertrude to some notable piece of female work. Clara, after playing us a few airs on her lute, possessed herself of Tracey’s volume of Browning, and pretended to read. The Painter flung himself on the grass, and contemplated with an artist’s eye the curves in the bank, and the lengthening shadows that crept over the still waters. Henry, ever restless, wandered away with a rod in his hand towards a distant gravelly creek, in which the old man at the lodge assured us he had seen perch of three pounds weight.

The Librarian alone remained seated at the table, finishing very slowly his bottle of claret, and apparently preparing himself for a peaceful slumber.

Tracey and I strolled along the margin of the lake, the swans following us as we walked: they were old friends of his.

“So,” said Tracey at last, “you think that my course of life has not been a wise one.”

“If all men lived like you, it might be very well for a paradise, but very bad for the world we dwell in.”

“Possibly; but it would be very bad for the world we dwell in if the restless spirits were not in some degree kept in check by the calm ones. What a miserable, unsafe, revolutionary state of society would be that in which all the members were men of combative ambition and fidgety genius; all haranguing, fighting, scribbling; all striving, each against the other! We sober fellows are the ballast in the state vessel: without us, it would upset in the first squall! We have our uses, my friend, little as you seem disposed to own it.”

“My dear Tracey, the question is not whether a ship should carry ballast, but whether you are of the proper material for ballast. And when I wonder why a man of great intellect and knowledge should not make his intellect and knowledge more largely useful, it is a poor answer to tell me that he is as useful as—a bag of stones.”

“A motive power is as necessary to impel a man, whatever his intellect or knowledge, towards ambitious action, as it is to lift a stone from the hold of a vessel into the arch of a palace. No motive power from without urges me into action, and the property inherent in me is to keep still.”

“Well, it is true, yours is so exceptional a lot that it affords no ground for practical speculation on human life. Take a patrician of £60,000 a year, who only spends £6000: give him tastes so cultivated that he has in himself all resources; diet him on philosophy till he says, with the Greek sage, ‘Man is made to contemplate, and to gaze on the stars,’ and it seems an infantine credulity to expect that this elegant Looker-on will condescend to take part with the actors on the world’s stage. Yet without the actors, the world would be only a drop-scene for the Lookers-on. Yours, I repeat, is an exceptional case. And those who admire your mind, must regret that it has been robbed of fame by your fortune.”

“Flatterer,” said Tracey, with his imperturbable good-temper, “I am ashamed of myself to know that you have not hit on the truth. If I had been born to £200 a year, and single as I am now—that is, free to choose my own mode of life—I should have been, I was about to say as idle as I am, but idle is not the word; I should have been as busy in completing my own mind, and as reluctant to force that mind into the squabbles of that mob which you call the world: in fact, I am but a type—somewhat exaggerated by accidental circumstances, which make me more prominent than others to your friendly if critical eye—of a very common and a very numerous class in a civilisation so cultivated as that of our age. Wherever you look, you will find men whom the world has never heard of, yet who in intellect or knowledge could match themselves against those whose names are in all the newspapers. Allow me to ask, Do you not know, in the House of Commons, men who never open their lips, but for whose mere intellect, in judgment, penetration, genuine statesmanship, you have more respect than you have for that of the leading orators? Allow me to ask again, Should you say the profoundest minds and the most comprehensive scholars are to be found among the most popular authors of your time; or among men who have never published a line, and never will? Answer me frankly.”

“I will answer you frankly. I should say that, in political judgment and knowledge, there are many men in the back benches of Parliament, who are the most admirable critics of the leading statesmen. I should say that, in many educated, fastidious gentlemen, there are men who, in exquisite taste and extensive knowledge, are the most admirable critics of the popular authors. But still there is an immense difference in human value between even a first-rate critic who does not publish his criticisms, and even a second or third-rate statesman or author who does contribute his quota of thought to the intellectual riches of the world.”

“Granted; but the distinction between man and man, in relation to the public, is not mere intellect, nor mere knowledge; it is in something else. What is it?”

“Dr Arnold, the schoolmaster, said, that as between boy and boy the distinction was energy, perhaps it is so with men.”

“Energy! yes: but what puts the energy into movement? what makes one man dash into fame by a harum-scarum book full of blunders and blemishes, or a random fiery speech, of which any sound thinker would be heartily ashamed; and what keeps back the man who could write a much better book and make a much better speech?”

“Perhaps,” said I, ironically, “that extreme of elegant vanity, an over-fastidious taste; perhaps that extreme of philosophical do-nothingness, which always contemplates and never acts.”

“Possibly you are right,” answered Tracey, shaming my irony by his urbane candour. “But why has the man this extreme of elegant vanity or philosophical do-nothingness? Is it not, perhaps, after all, a physical defect? the lymphatic temperament instead of the nervous-bilious?”

“You are not lymphatic,” said I, with interest; for my hobby is—metaphysical pathology, or pathological metaphysics—“You,” said I, “are not lymphatic; you are dark-haired, lean, and sinewy; why the deuce should you not be energetic! it must be that infamous £60,000 which has paralysed all your motive power.”

“Friend,” answered Tracey, “are there not some some men in the House of Lords with more than £60,000 a year, and who could scarcely be more energetic if they lived on 4d. a day and worked for it?”

“There have been, and are, such instances in the Peerage, doubtless; but, as a general rule, the wealthiest peers are seldom the most active. Still, I am willing to give your implied argument the full benefit of the illustration you cite. Wherever legislative functions are attached to hereditary aristocracy, that aristocracy, as long as the State to which they belong is free, will never fail of mental vigour—of ambition for reputation and honours achieved in the public service. It was so with the senators of Rome as long as the Roman Republic lasted; it will be so with the members of the House of Lords as long as the English Constitution exists. And in such an order of men there will always be a degree of motive power sufficiently counteracting the indolence and epicurism which great wealth in itself engenders, to place a very large numerical proportion of the body among the most active and aspiring spirits of the time. But your misfortune, my dear Tracey, has been this (and hence I call your case exceptional)—that, immeasurably above the average of our peers, both in illustration of descent and in territorial possessions, still you have had none of the duties, none of the motive power, which actuate hereditary legislators. You have had their wealth—you have had their temptations to idleness; you have not had their responsible duties—you have not had their motives for energy and toil. That is why I call your case exceptional.”

“Still,” answered Tracey, “I say that I am but a very commonplace type of educated men who belong neither to the House of Lords nor the House of Commons, and who, in this country, despise ambition, yet in some mysterious latent way serve to influence opinion. Motive power—motive power! how is it formed? why is it so capricious? why sometimes strongest in the rich and weakest in the poor? why does knowledge sometimes impart, and sometimes destroy it? On these questions I do not think that your reasonings will satisfy me. I am sure that mine would not satisfy you. Let us call in a third party and hear what he has to say on the matter. Ride with me to-morrow to the house of a gifted friend of mine, who was all for public life once, and is all for private life now. I will tell you who and what he is. In early life my friend carried off the most envied honours of a university. Almost immediately on taking his degree, he obtained his fellowship. Thus he became an independent man. The career most suited to his prospects was that of the Church. To this he had a conscientious objection; not that he objected to the doctrines of our Church, nor that he felt in himself any consciousness of sinful propensities at variance with the profession; but simply because he did not feel that strong impulse towards the holiest of earthly vocations, without which a very clever man may be a very indifferent parson: and his ambition led him towards political distinction. His reputation for talents, and for talents adapted to public life, was so high, that he received an offer to be brought into Parliament at the first general election, from a man of great station, with whose son he had been intimate at college, and who possessed a predominant influence in a certain borough. The offer was accepted. But before it could be carried out, a critical change occurred in my friend’s life and in his temper of mind. A distant relation, whom he had never even seen, died, and left him a small estate in this county: on taking possession of the property, he naturally made acquaintance with the rector of the parish, and formed a sudden and passionate attachment for one of the rector’s daughters, resigned the fellowship he no longer needed, married the young lady, and found himself so happy with his young partner and in his new home, that before the general election took place, the idea of the parliamentary life, which he had before coveted, became intolerable to him. He excused himself to the borough and its patron, and has ever since lived as quietly in his rural village, as if he had never known the joys of academical triumph, nor nursed the hope of political renown. Let us then go and see him to-morrow (it is a very pretty ride across the country), and you will be compelled to acknowledge that his £600 or £700 a year of wood and sheepwalk, with peace and love at his fireside, have sufficed to stifle ambition in one whose youth had been intensely ambitious. So you see it does not need £60,000 a year to make a man cling to private life, and shrink from all that, in shackling him with the fetters and agitating him with the passion of public life, would lessen his personal freedom and mar his intellectual serenity.”

“I shall be glad to see your friend. What is his name?”

“Hastings Gray.”

“What! the Hastings Gray who, seventeen or eighteen years ago, made so remarkable a speech at some public meeting (I own I forget where it was), and wrote the political pamphlet which caused so great a sensation!”

“The same man.”

“I remember that he was said to have distinguished himself highly at the university, and that he was much talked of in London, for a few weeks, as a man likely to come into Parliament, and even to make a figure in it. Since then, never having heard more of him, I supposed he was dead. I am glad to learn that he only sleepeth.”

Here we heard behind us the muffled fall of hoofs on the sward; our party was in movement homeward, Lady Gertrude leading the van in her pony chaise. I had to retake my place by her side; Clara and the Librarian followed in a similar vehicle, driven by Henry Thornhill, who had caught none of the great perches; I suspect he had not tried for them. Percival and the Painter rode. The twilight deepened, and soon melted into a starry night, as we went through the shadowy forest-land.

Lady Gertrude talked incessantly and agreeably, but I was a very dull companion, and, being in a musing humour, would much rather have been alone. At length we saw the moon shining on the white walls of the villa. “I fear we have tired you with our childish party of pleasure,” said Lady Gertrude, with a malicious fling at my silence.

“Perhaps I am tired,” I replied, ingenuously. “Pleasures are fatiguing, especially when one is not accustomed to them.”

“Satirist!” said Lady Gertrude. “You come from the brilliant excitement of London, and what may be pleasure to us must be _ennui_ to you.”

“Nay, Lady Gertrude, let me tell you what a very clever and learned man, a Minister of State, said the other day at one of those great public ceremonial receptions which are the customary holidays of a Minister of State. ‘Life,’ said he, pensively, ‘would be tolerably agreeable if it were not for its amusements.’ He spoke of those ‘brilliant excitements,’ as you call them, which form the amusements of capitals. He would not have spoken so of the delight which Man can extract from a holiday with Nature. But tell me, you who have played so considerable a part in the world of fashion, do you prefer the drawing-rooms of London to the log-house by the lake?”

“Why,” said Lady Gertrude, honestly, and with a half-sigh; “I own I should be glad if Percival would consent to spend six months in the year, or even three, in London. However, what he likes I like. Providence has made us women of very pliable materials.”

“Has it?” said I; “that information is new to me—one lives to learn.” And here, as the pony stopped at the porch, I descended to offer my arm to the amiable charioteer.

Nothing worth recording took place the rest of the evening. Henry and the Painter played at billiards, Lady Gertrude and the Librarian at backgammon. Clara went into the billiard-room, seating herself there with her work: by some fond instinct of her loving nature she felt as if she ought not to waste the minutes yet vouchsafed to her—she was still with him who was all in all to her!

I took down ‘The Faithful Shepherdess,’ wishing to refresh my memory of passages which the scenes we had visited that day vaguely recalled to my mind. Looking over my shoulder, Percival guided me to the lines I was hunting after. This led to comparisons between ‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ and the ‘Comus,’ and thence to that startling contrast in the way of viewing, and in the mode of describing, rural nature, between the earlier English poets and those whom Dryden formed upon Gallic models, and so on into the pleasant clueless labyrinth of metaphysical criticism on the art of poetic genius. When we had parted for the night, and I regained my own room, I opened my window and looked forth on the moonlit gardens. A few minutes later, a shadow, moving slow, passed over the silvered ground, and, descending the terrace stairs, vanished among the breathless shrubs and slumbering flowers. I recognised the man who loved to make night his companion.

(_To be continued._)

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 an _eloge_ than 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 the
_Pays 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 the _budget 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 the _police 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 an _avocat du roi_ who 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 an _agency 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.